Mission Station Christianity : Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850-1890 [1 ed.] 9789004257405, 9789004254886

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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 MissionsTidende 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--KwaZuluNatal--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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For Wayne

CONTENTS 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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has taken on a life of its own and become something quite different 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 encouragement 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 examiners, Fenella Cannell and Peter Pels, for envisaging future directions for my work. I am particularly grateful to Fenella for introducing me to the anthropology 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 opportunities 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 manuscript 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 constructive 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

xii acknowledgments helpful in setting up workspaces for me. An Overseas Research Student Award from Universities UK helped to fund some of the research that has made its way into this book, as did an Additional Award for Fieldwork from the SOAS Scholarships Committee. Parts of chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5 were published, in earlier form, as the article “Umpumulo, place of rest: A nineteenth-century Christian mission station among the Zulus” in Radical History Review 2007: 140–57. (Copyright, 2007, MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press.) I am grateful for the encouragement and interest of friends, family, and colleagues along the way. Many have served as sounding boards at various points, including Giovanna Maiola, Nicola Schmidt, Barbara Brank, Liz Webber, my sister Kristine Hovland, Eirin Næss-Sørensen, Kristin Ådnøy Eriksen and Tor Egil Eriksen Ingeborg Mongstad-Kvammen, Marianne Skjortnes and Kjetil Aano, Kristin Aalen and Ola Hunsager, as well as several others. But most of all, of course, more thanks than I can express go to my husband, Wayne Coppins, who has read the whole manuscript twice, helped to detect the missionaries’ biblical allusions, and thrown wooden blocks around with our youngest daughter during some of those late evening work hours. And last, but in no way least, I am deeply grateful to our two little girls, Sophia and Simone, for their lively presence and the way they have transformed our space.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

THEORIZING THE MISSIONARY EXPERIENCE: CHRISTIANITY, COLONIALISM, AND SPACES Umphumulo is the most beautiful place I know. Not because of any particular 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 people, 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 missionaries 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.

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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 inhabiting 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 contained, 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 magazine 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 written in Norwegian, and most translations here are my own; at times I have also benefited



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But, is it not so that history has proved it impossible to establish an independent 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 supported 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 occupation of our missionaries is plainly to walk about with the message of salvation 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 missionaries. 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 working 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 congregation among them according to the apostolic pattern and care for its preservation 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.

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white colonial rule over the people identified as Zulus, and by the 1880s many of the Norwegian missionaries had even developed a theological justification for the British military invasion of Zululand. How did this trend take shape between 1850 and 1890, as the Norwegian missionaries tried to work out the tension between abstract ideas of potential equality between Norwegian and Zulu Christians, which the Board had instructed them to implement, and their own practices, which supported unequal relationships and structures that were racially marked, culminating in their theological support for the violent implementation of colonial, white, male authority over the Zulus? Secondly, the first Norwegian missionaries who left for Southern Africa were instructed by the Board of the Norwegian Missionary Society to focus their mission activity around preaching the Word. The Board in Stavanger clearly envisaged this to involve at least some traveling among the Zulus. To repeat Andreas Hauge’s words from above, “The principal occupation of our missionaries is plainly to walk about with the message of salvation in Christ.”6 The Norwegian missionaries who were sent to Southern Africa also expressed that they wished to incorporate itinerant preaching into their work – and at least twice they expressed this as a group, at their annual missionary conferences in 18637 and 1881.8 Yet despite this avowed purpose, it soon became apparent that the missionaries established a pattern of building and settling on permanent mission stations, and the majority of them never undertook any longer itinerant preaching journeys at all. During the first decades after Umphumulo was established, from 1850 to the mid-1870s, only three, perhaps four Norwegian missionaries undertook one longer journey each among the Zulus – and the primary purpose of these expeditions was to assess the feasibility of establishing a new station in the area that the missionary traveled to, though they also preached when given the opportunity (Jørgensen 1990:111). Most of the early missionaries never undertook any longer journeys of itinerant preaching, and the vast majority of the missionaries’ time and energy was spent on their stations. The Norwegian missionaries were not alone in this trend. European and American missionaries arrived in Southern Africa in the 1830s and 40s with differing strategies in mind, but with the same broad goal of evangelizing to as many people as possible, in order to convert them. However, by 1880 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).



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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 missionaries from around 1850–1890 were related: on the one hand, their deepening 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 differentiated 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 military 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 critical 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 inevitable. 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 anthropology 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 mission in nineteenth-century Southern Africa that contributes to an understanding of the dynamics that have shaped South African Christianity and

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modernity.9 Within this field there has been a relative paucity of scholarly work on French, German, Swiss and Scandinavian missions, compared to existing work on British and American missions.10 Nevertheless, there are a few published academic studies on the nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries that were sent by NMS to Natal and Zululand. Three of these studies are especially relevant to my time period (1850–1890). Firstly, Olav Guttorm Myklebust, theologian and missionary for NMS to South Africa from 1931–1939, wrote a biography of NMS’ first missionary, Hans Palludan Smith Schreuder, who stepped ashore in Port Natal in 1844 (Myklebust 1980, 1986).11 Myklebust’s extensive study on Hans Schreuder contains a mass of information, but it is, as Norman Etherington (1996:207) also notes, a spirited exercise in hagiography, and it often has to bend over backwards to defend this complex, intrepid, and sometimes difficult man. Two more robust scholarly studies then appeared. In 1984, the historian Jarle Simensen drew on a collection of Masters theses written by his students for an edited volume in Norwegian (Simensen 1984a), subsequently published in English, in different version, as Norwegian Missions in African History, Vol. 1: South Africa 1845–1906 (Simensen 1986a). And in 1990, Torstein Jørgensen published his doctoral dissertation in church history, Contact and Conflict: Norwegian Missionaries, the Zulu Kingdom, and the Gospel, 1850–1873.12 Simensen and Jørgensen’s studies are both attempts at achieving a fuller understanding of the nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand. Simensen approaches this task from the premise 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 literature listed in footnotes 10 and 14 below. 10 Norman Etherington (1996:218) noted this lack in the mid-1990s; Etherington has himself 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 history (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 chapter on Zulu responses to the Norwegian missionaries (Jørgensen 2002a), and a book chapter on one of the early Zulu converts (Jørgensen 2002b).



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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 implications, 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 religion 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 encountered. Jørgensen’s book is replete with citations and examples from the writings of the missionaries, and he has organized this wealth of information 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 several 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 chapters 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 nineteenthcentury 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

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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 understand 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 movement 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).



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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 expression 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,

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they were “a hot-bed of Christocentric piety and heartiness at a time when [Norwegian] intellectual life in general and the church was dominated by a cool climate” (Molland 1979:98, quoted in Jørgensen 1990:80). They savored the more intense experiences of Evangelicalism. They encouraged meditation on the beauty of salvation in Jesus, and were especially drawn to meditate on the image of Jesus on the cross. The Haugeans, on the other hand, represented a more sober version of the Evangelical revivals. The Haugean movement had been founded by the Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nilsen Hauge around the turn of the nineteenth century, who encouraged devout belief and hard work among his followers. Haugeans were known to be frugal people – and as a result some of them saved up considerable wealth. They emphasized the importance of a temperate and honest life. In the 1820s, Moravians and Haugeans started to form “mission groups” that met to hear news of Christian missions overseas, to pray for them, and to donate money (Nome 1942). In 1842, representatives from 65 of these recently formed “mission groups” as well as a number of other interested men, including some clergy from the (Lutheran) Church of Norway, met to endorse a set of bylaws for a loosely structured Norwegian mission initiative. The initiative was named the Norwegian Missionary Society (Det Norske Missionsselskab). They set up a Board to act as decision-making body. The following year, in 1843, they sent out their first missionary, the Norwegian Lutheran pastor Hans Schreuder. On the recommendation of the British missionary Robert Moffat who worked among the Tswana in Southern Africa, Hans Schreuder traveled to the eastern coast of Southern Africa to see if he could establish a mission among the people identified as the Zulus.18 The Zulu King Mpande had not yet allowed any permanent Christian mission to be established within his kingdom, which lay just north of the British Colony of Natal. The Norwegian Missionary Society also set up a “Mission School” in the town of Stavanger, on the west coast of Norway. In the 1840s, three young men enrolled – Tobias Udland, Ommund Oftebro, and Lars Larsen. Like most of the other young men who were recruited to the nineteenth-century mission cause in Western Europe, they came from farming, craftsmen or artisan backgrounds, and had strong Evangelical conversion experiences in their teens or early twenties (Simensen with Gynnild 1986:28, 33). (Hans Schreuder was an exception to both of these trends.) At the Mission School 18 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1888:358, “Referat af Forhandlingerne paa Generalforsamlingen i Kristiansand fra 5.-8. juli 1888.”



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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 fourteen mission stations in Southern Africa. Four of these were in colonial Natal: Umphumulo (1850), Esinyamboti (1886), Eotimati (1886), and a station 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.

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established one new station in Natal, namely Untunjambili (1874), and also took over the Kwahlabisa station from NMS. 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 missionaries 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 expressions 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)



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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 seriously on its own terms rather than rewriting it. I would hesitate, however, to draw as clear a distinction as them between culture and religious experience, 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 expressions 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 suggesting 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 underline 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 missionaries, 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).

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on to the God that was familiar to them when it became difficult to show for certain that this God existed in a new cultural context, where material forms were given new meanings. It is against this background that I will speak of a particular culture of Christianity, the changing Christianity of the Norwegian missionaries who were based in Natal and Zululand from around 1850–1890. In so doing I wish to contribute to the growing field of the anthropology of Christianity.22 Robbins (2007) has observed that in order to help this field build up a substantial amount of theoretical and methodological reflection, it is not enough simply to produce further ethnographic studies of Christian communities. Rather, the studies that are produced need to contribute to a community of scholarship in which common problems are formulated, discussed, and developed. To this end, I wish to pay careful attention to the ways in which the changing shape of the missionaries’ Christianity was constituted through the construction of “different” spaces and the use of words and things (chapter 2), the bodies of the missionaries (chapter 3), the missionaries’ relationship with Zulu converts (chapter 4), Zulu perceptions of the mission stations (chapter 5), and the missionaries’ own visions of the stations (chapter 6). In the concluding part of the book (chapters 7 and 8) I return to the complex question of what happened to nineteenth-century missionary Christianity in its colonial context. Chapter 7 discusses the Norwegian missionaries’ response to the events surrounding the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, including their uneven practical and moral support for British rule over the Zulus. Chapter 8 draws the book’s themes together by reflecting on the effects that Christianity can have on spaces – and the profound effects that spaces can have on Christianity. 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, different forms of violence, overrule, and economic exploitation, as well as in diffuse processes of cultural encounter, imposed social roles and definitions, 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).



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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).

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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 conditions 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 collection 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 unpublished 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.



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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,” occupied 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 colonial  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 colonial question of land, and its fraught relationship to race, through their insistence on (white, male) missionary rule over mission stations, including 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 instilment of colonial roles, so that certain people come to re-cognize themselves as “natives” (Comaroffs 1997:19, citing Sartre 1955:215). For my study, I am particularly concerned with the perceived opposite, the parallel process 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 colonialism, 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, hearsay 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 missionaries’ 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

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in which historical agency, that is, the effort of the missionaries, seems markedly limited in the short term, and self-contradictory and paradoxical in the long term. 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 setting up of spaces is shaped by and in turn gives shape to human ideas, experience and practice, including religious practice. I am interested in the social and material microcosm of the mission station space. This was the place where the missionaries lived, farmed, and held reading classes and Sunday services – and where in due course resident communities of employees, converts, and visiting patients and refugees 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 pastoralists and the farms of the colonists, “[i]t is perhaps in the story of its domestic arrangements that South African history has been most conservative” (Hamilton, Mbenga and Ross 2010:xvi). Paul Landau too points out the



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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 interesting 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 significance 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 anthropologists; indeed, there is hardly an older or better established anthropological 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 cultural  differences that exist in different spaces – but to an exploration of how cultural differences are produced and how they come to be spatially  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).

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including their practice of placing a white male missionary as the head of the station. This does not mean, however, that the effect of the mission stations was a straightforward one, for example of simply increasing the power and status of the Norwegian male missionaries. The experiences (in the plural) of the different male and female missionaries on the stations also contained several ambiguities, tensions, and ironic results. This instability is a core element of the space of the mission stations, and I seek to draw it out by focusing variously on the ambiguities that surrounded the words and things that the missionaries placed within the space of the mission station (chapter 2), the struggles that were associated with the missionary body (chapter 3), the tensions that were introduced by the missionaries’ relationship to Zulu converts on the stations (chapter 4), the tensions between Zulu perceptions of the mission stations and the missionaries’ reactions to these (chapter 5), and the disjuncture between the missionaries’ vision for the mission stations and their everyday experiences (chapter 6). These themes reveal passionate contestations over the meanings of the mission station, including over the many Zulu and Norwegian explanations given for it, and show how strongly the missionaries were affected by their own “defense” of the space. In the concluding part of the book, I examine the implications of the mission stations as plots of land, especially in relation to the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and its aftermath of civil war. Many of the mission stations came to function as “native reserves” under expanded colonial rule, and building on previous scholarship by C. Tsheloane Keto (1976), I will touch on some of the contradictory consequences that the missionaries’ careful demarcation of plots of land had for early racial separations and land distribution in what later came to be apartheid South Africa. 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 “ethnography 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



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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, reading 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 important 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 immediately 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 processes” in chapter 4; “Interpreting binary metaphors” and “Reading mission 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 methodological 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 concerns how researchers should approach the disjuncture between missionary 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.

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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 perspectives (Geertz 1999). The text shifts between describing events and viewpoints “near” to the missionaries’ experience, and descriptions of other contemporary processes or perspectives – related, for example, to the colonial 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 theoretical 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 trying 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 standard 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 different 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 complicated processes we are interpreting, together with their often painful implications, 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 understand 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



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the importance of the unfamiliar, of surprise in historical explanation: you are in the sixteenth century, and you stumble upon some peculiarity, something 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 complementary 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

CHAPTER TWO

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 communicate 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 services 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 missionaries 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

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missionaries choose to start out in this way in order to address the “problem of presence” (Engelke 2007) – in other words, in order to make their invisible God visible and “present”? Which words and things did they consider important from the beginning? What was the connection between morality and materiality that the Norwegian missionaries were seeking to exploit, or create, as they decided to communicate Christ by constructing a new kind of space – a mission station? 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 themselves, 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 linguistic 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 themselves 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 interlocutors referred to themselves collectively as “we black people,”2 perhaps leaving 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.



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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 discussion, 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 several 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) succinctly 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 permission for members of a specific amabutho to enter into marriage – a powerful 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 married 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.

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broken up and displaced. Early on this was blamed on the violence of Shaka and his Zulu army, though a closer examination of the historical evidence points at a number of destabilizing factors during this period, including violent actions of other powerful chiefdoms, British settler aggression against Xhosa chiefdoms on the eastern edges of the Cape Colony, which pushed these groups onto land occupied by others, and raiding bandit groups which took advantage of the unstable situation (Wright 2010:232–34).5 In 1828 Shaka was assassinated by his half-brother Dingane, who took the throne. A coastal British trading port south of the Thukela river, Port Natal, attracted a small group of settled British traders who were nominally within the Zulu kingdom and subject to Dingane (Wright 2010:252). Another period of upheaval followed, however, in the 1830s, as cohorts of Boers trekked over the Drakensberg mountains and into territory controlled by the Zulu king. The Boers were mainly Dutch settlers who had moved away from the Cape Colony and sought land. Dingane attempted to fight back the Boers in 1838 in the Battle of Ncome River (known among the Boers as the Battle of Blood River), but neither side emerged victorious as far as the possession of land was concerned. In 1840, however, Dingane was defeated and killed by his younger brother Mpande, who succeeded him as king. Under Mpande a border was drawn between the Zulu kingdom to the north of the Thukela, and a short-lived Boer Republic of Natalia to the south. The prospect of a Boer Republic in this strategic spot proved so alarming to British colonial officials that in 1843 a British force invaded and turned the area into the British Colony of Natal. A large portion of the Boers trekked out of Natal to the Highveld (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:358). Following this retreat of both Zulu and Boer claims to the land south of the Thukela, large areas of land were left open. These were quickly occupied by returning or newly arriving small- and middle-sized African chieftaincies. We do not have accurate population figures, but one estimate suggests that within just a few years the African population of Natal grew from a few thousand to around 100,000 (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:358). By the late 1840s the D’Urban settlement by Port Natal had grown into a small town, with schools and churches, and perhaps 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).



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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 circumstances 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.

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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 missionaries 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 welcomed 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.



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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 important 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 permission 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 distributing 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

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unskilled and cheap African labor force that the white settlers could draw on (Keto 1976:605). The early mission stations thus from the start became “foci of material struggles […] over the control of nonwhite labour and mobility” (Elbourne 2002:160). The colonial authorities in Natal in this case sided with the missionaries over the settlers. However, they seemed to favor Anglophone missionaries, and assigned reserves to British Methodists and American Congregationalists first. Hans Schreuder’s annoyance was further aggravated when even the German Berlin mission was granted land in the northern part of the colony, while he was still overlooked (Hale 1997:20). Finally, in 1850, Hans Schreuder too was granted a glebe of 500 acres in the hinterland of northern Natal, just south of the Thukela (Myklebust 1949:29–30). He named the place Umphumulo,11 an adaptation of the Zulu term for “place of rest,” maphumulo. When my family moved to the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Umphumulo in the mid-1980s, I still at times heard my parents refer to the boundaries of “the glebe”; the colonial land policy that had been gradually worked out in mid-nineteenthcentury Natal was still a reality, over 130 years later. At Umphumulo in 1850, Hans Schreuder was still waiting for a chance to set up a station within Zululand itself. He had already been to visit King Mpande. His moment of opportunity came shortly afterwards when he was summoned to return to the Zulu king and to bring his box of medicines. The king was in pain. Hans managed to treat these pains – with homemade creams and massage – and was duly given permission to set up a mission station within the Zulu kingdom. Hans Schreuder promptly started setting up the new station Empangeni, which he named after a nearby stream. In official histories of NMS (Sommerfelt 1865:171–2, Myklebust 1949:30– 32, Jørgensen 1992:33–5), this break-through is ascribed to Hans Schreuder’s medical expertise, and “Schreuder’s medicine box” has become so lodged in organizational memory that I even heard it referred to during my fieldwork in 2003–04. Jarle Simensen (1988:173), on the other hand, argues that the permission to set up a mission station inside Zululand was hardly due to Hans Schreuder’s medicine box alone; it was rather a sign that King Mpande saw the potential advantages of having a resident white man within his borders, as a way of creating a potential bridge to the British in Natal. 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.



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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 surrounding 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 medicines 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 religious-medical expertise and, probably, by virtue of being white and therefore 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).

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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 permission 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, consisted of a small group of beehive huts arranged around a cattle enclosure,  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.



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The people in the area around Umphumulo were thought of by the missionaries 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 followers 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 simple, 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 children to come to reading lessons, with varying success. They erected a simple, 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 missionaries 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.

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traditionally perceived as women’s work among the Zulus. These disjunctures re-occurred on mission stations across Southern Africa (cf. Jean and John Comaroff’s discussion of the missionaries’ agricultural practices; Comaroffs 1997:119–65). At Umphumulo too the demarcation of fields and their new association with European agricultural methods and with men, rather than women, started to define the station land as a different space. Gradually Ommund, Lars and Martha created more stability by establishing a daily rhythm.19 They rose early, milked the cows, and then had breakfast together. After breakfast, they held a morning devotion where they took it in turns to read a chapter of the Bible and then knelt together in prayer. By 1854 they had built “the boys’ house,” a one-room house for young boys to stay in at the station while they were employed, if they wished, and the morning devotion was attended by “the natives on the station” as well, if they were interested.20 In the same manner as the British missionaries James and Mrs. Allison in the early days of the Edendale mission community in Natal (Meintjes 1990:132–3), the Norwegians at Umphumulo in the early 1850s drew the young people employed on their station directly into their household. After the morning devotion, Ommund and Lars sat down to teach the male Zulus on the station to read, while Martha taught reading to a young girl who came to work for her. Then it was time for various work duties, which included ploughing, moulding bricks, and building for the men, and cooking, sewing, and other duties related to the domestic sphere for the women,21 before everyone came together again for a midday meal. In the afternoon, Ommund and Lars took turns giving reading lessons to any children from the neighboring area who turned up; around half the time, as recorded by Lars in March 1852, no children came, but on the other days they could number from one to eleven.22 Finally, the day was rounded off as they gathered in the school house to read a passage from the Bible, to sing and to pray. On Sundays this rhythm was not followed, as Sunday was set aside for rest and for holding a Sunday service on the station. This transformation of the way time was used at Umphumulo proved effective in redefining the space. For the missionaries, their daily schedule 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.



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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 appropriate 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 comforted 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 overview 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 followed 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 dictate 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

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managed to institute a seven-day week for the young people they employed at Umphumulo, were in their way a part of this larger shift that introduced new rhythms. A final interesting aspect about the daily rhythm that the missionaries followed at Umphumulo is the importance accorded to reading. Reading of printed Zulu texts was taught both in the mornings to those working on the station, and in the afternoons to any neighboring children who showed up. The missionaries started holding reading lessons almost immediately after moving to Umphumulo. For them, as for other Protestant missionaries in Natal, the ability to read was a prerequisite for being able to engage personally with the Word of God. (The many complex meanings that came to be tied to these reading classes will be discussed further in chapter 5.) In the same way as the daily rhythm was important to the missionaries, with its allotted time for devotions, reading, and work, the rectangular houses that they built were also meaningful. First of all, this was a familiar shape to the missionaries, and thus in the foreign place that they had landed, the houses may have served as a type of bodily attachment or material extension of their selves. Shannon Sullivan suggests, in her interpretation of Frantz Fanon (1986, 2001), that “psychical, bodily, and social spaces cannot be categorically separated from each other” (Sullivan 2004:19). In other words, one’s physical self, one’s understanding of oneself, and the way one is in the world mutually influence and constitute one another. This ongoing constitution of the self forms and fashions the spaces that we occupy, so that they will fit our selves. At the same time, the spaces that we occupy inform and form us. Fanon argues that we take up the world through our bodily “schemas,” that is, through our bodies and their attachments. Bodily attachments might be, for example, the child’s teddy bear, the white woman’s idea of whiteness, the young man’s coat – or the missionaries’ square houses. The way that we relate to the space that we physically occupy, and the space of our “selves,” should not be seen as separate. There is an ongoing dialectic between our bodies and the world.23 Therefore, any 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 mission stations in Madagascar. While keeping Bourdieu at the back of my mind, I shall pay more explicit attention here to Fanon.



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shift between worlds – any “world-traveling” (Sullivan 2004:10) – will alter and affect our bodily horizons, and, conversely, changes in our bodily schemas 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 visible. 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, classroom 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 example, 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 missionaries 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 rectangular houses for missionaries, rectangular houses or round huts for employees 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 distance 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

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of the economic system that was to develop, as land and labor were turned into capital and the domain of the British farmer was separated from the African laborer. The mission stations in Natal and Zululand are not directly comparable to the more substantial British settler houses in the Eastern Cape, since the mission stations were never fortified in the way that the manor houses were (one manor house even had a tower with a small cannon; Crais 1992:136). The Norwegian mission stations were built with an open plan that encouraged visitors to stop by the station, and did not, for example, have fences. After a while, the Norwegian mission stations also included houses – both rectangular and round – built and occupied by African converts. But the preferred rectangular houses on the mission stations did pick up layers of meaning from other European houses at the time, including the significance, as Crais points out, of difference and separation from African ways of life. While missionary houses took the issue of physical protection lightly in comparison to settler houses, they were all the more shot through with the need to establish religious and cultural difference. The missionaries wished to use the visual impact of the station landscape as a shorthand for these differences. The rectangular houses, as objects, both embodied a set of connections to certain ways of life (Latour 2005), and were used as material cues to delineate a certain moral sphere distinct from its surroundings – an inhabitable Christian world on the station (cf. Engelke 2007, Keane 2006). Again, the missionaries were implicated in larger processes here of which they were only partially aware. Many of the square buildings required the use of European tools and bolstered European imports. Around a decade after Umphumulo was set up, Theophilus Shepstone exempted Zulu residents in square houses – such as converts on the mission stations – from the British hut tax, on the assumption that they would have had to import dutiable European goods (Etherington 1978:116) – and as an incentive to “further civilization,” in the words of Norwegian missionary Tobias Udland.24 The houses played a role in introducing not only Western ways of living to Natal, but also Western trade. They became a part of new economic dynamics. The missionaries were woven into these dynamics, whether they liked it or not. In the early 1850s, Lars Larsen commented disapprovingly on the British hut tax: “This is politics indeed. The children of the country have to pay for the strangers to have a highway into their land.”25 Yet even though he may have wished to distinguish himself from 24 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1863:57. 25 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1852/53:119–20.



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the “strangers” in the British colonial administration, he too built square houses in the midst of Zulu surroundings in the Maphumulo area in northern Natal, which, in some ways, aided the colonial process. The contradictions 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 parentheses, hints at both the practical uses of a garden as a field, in producing vegetables and fruit, as well as the horticultural and aesthetic connotations that “gardens” held for the European missionaries. John MacKenzie (2003:112) suggests that the establishment of European-style mission gardens in Africa was part of their broader “education of the landscape,” and for many missionaries the wish to transform and order the African landscape came to symbolize their wish to bring about the spiritual transformation 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 missionaries 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 difference. 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.

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subservience, Zulus who came to work on the mission stations in principle took on the same garb as the missionaries (Etherington 2002:435). Yet in some ways the clothing – ostensibly the same – also came to produce differences between missionaries and Zulu converts (as will be discussed in chapter 4 on the converts). These various implications of building square houses, establishing a daily rhythm on the station, demarcating fields and gardens, and distrib­ uting European-style clothing, provide a glimpse into the complex cultural,  economic and political processes that the Norwegian missionaries suddenly found themselves caught up in. Nothing – not even the “normal” shape of a house, as they knew it – could be taken for granted in this new space; everything they touched took on new and multiple meanings, some of which they intended and others of which they were not fully aware. 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 particular, 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 landscape 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 further in chapter 6). This highlights one of the challenges of anthropological history, namely how to understand the complicated interplay between historical 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



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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 tendency to paint a picture of autonomous actions and overly neat crystallizations, 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 partially aware. In the midst of these processes, they make choices and decisions 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 mission 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 presence 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

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nearness of the shades causes madness in men [and women],” the anthropologist Monica Wilson wrote in the 1970s (Wilson 1977:189). Each family lineage sought the protection of its shades, and these shades were especially associated with certain spaces in the homestead, such as a hut’s doorway, hearth, and the space farthest away from the door, and equivalent spaces within the cattle enclosure (Berglund 1976:102–12). The Zulus had various ways of communicating with the shades, including through leaving scraps of food near the hearth or being attentive to particular signs or dreams. They also consulted diviners, inyanga or isangoma, who were in closer contact with the shades. In the nineteenth century, the great majority of Zulu diviners were women (Porterfield 1997:74).29 There were different types of diviners, and while some worked as healers, others were also able to seek out the intentions or messages of the shades. However, the most powerful diviners, isanusi, were almost all men, and had the authority to “smell out,” that is, reveal witches and evil-doers, abathakathi (Berglund 1976:185). The Norwegian missionaries were not well equipped to engage with these new concepts and rituals, or to communicate their own religious concepts in Zulu terms. When Lars Larsen and Ommund Oftebro visited the neighboring Zulu homesteads around Umphumulo, they introduced themselves with their first names, and they became known as Ulasini and Mondi, the white teachers. When they tried to teach, Lars reported, the Zulus often remarked: “We understand your words very well, but the thing that you are talking about, we black people cannot well understand.” However, it does not appear so unreasonable to them that we believe e.g. in the teaching about the creation, the original sin, etc., that is all well for us white people, but if we go on and come to the teaching about the necessity of a savior, and we tell them, that this really is the case also for them, if we come to the teaching about the resurrection of the body and the final judgment, then they are gripped by amazement at our great stupidity.30

The sermon pattern that Lars has outlined here was a fairly common one among the Norwegian missionaries in the 1850s and 60s (Jørgensen 1990:125): it dwelt on the theme of the Christian “salvation history” as they knew it through their Evangelical, Lutheran lens. The salvation history 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.



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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 salvation 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 unbelievers 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 commandments (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.

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uMvelingqangi or uNkulunkulu broke off pieces of reed to create men and women. He then sent his chameleon to tell these newly created people that they would not die, but live forever. But the chameleon was slow and dawdled on the way. In the meantime the creator changed his mind, and sent the rapid lizard with a second, more ominous message. The rapid lizard reached the men and women first and told them that they would die.32 Lars Larsen observed that the Zulus usually found it reasonable that he and Ommund, as “white people,” believed in a different creation account.33 Hans Schreuder similarly noted that it was a struggle to convince the Zulus that the biblical creation account included the creation of “black people,” since they believed that “the origin or creation of black people was different from that of white people.”34 The biblical creation account – assumed to be for “white people” – does not seem to have awoken much interest. Thus, Ommund writes, the audience is usually very quiet during the [Sunday] services, but their attention seems largely to be poor. This is, however, understandable, as they are inclined to think of us as speaking of matters which, admittedly, might be of relevance to us “white teachers,” but which are certainly of no concern to them, being black people with their own customs and habits from ancient times.35

Hans Schreuder, in his preaching, tried to engage the Zulu audience by calling the serpent in the biblical Garden of Eden (which he took to be Satan) by the same name as the rapid lizard in the Zulu creation narrative: intulu.36 There was no other ready-made name for Satan, as the Zulus did not have an evil divinity, nor did they have a dualistic view of good and evil shades (Berglund 1976:248). Hans Schreuder therefore chose to draw on the similarity between the two trickster figures, the serpent in Eden and the lizard in the Zulu narrative, who both outsmarted the first, unwary human beings. Presumably the other Norwegian missionaries at the time followed his lead, though they do not tell us whether the use of the term intulu evoked any more reactions from their Zulu conversation partners. The missionaries also needed a Zulu name for God. There does not seem to have been a ready-made term for this either in the mid-nineteenth 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.



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century. Around a century later, in the 1960s, the Zulu diviners whom AxelIvar Berglund interviewed (while he served as a faculty member at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Umphumulo) operated with an established 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 comments 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 reading 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, somewhat 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 uMvelingqangi (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 translations 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.

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(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 multivalence 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 ambiguity 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 audience he phrased it as follows: Since the days of your forefathers you have deviated from the truth by replacing truth with human devices and imagination. You have abandoned, forgotten, 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 characteristic 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.



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day triumph over Satan and sit in judgment. He needed to be portrayed as powerful. In addition, William Worger (2001:444) argues that the missionaries 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.

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chapter two 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 preaching, 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.



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“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 objections. The Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland recorded the following common 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 developed 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 ambivalence 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 understanding Zulu culture in any depth – as opposed, for example, to the curiosity 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.

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therefore, to tell their story of salvation to the Zulus and to discuss it with them in the Zulu language, without any systematic effort at trying to elicit Zulu understandings of similar issues. The situation was perhaps succinctly summed up in the statement by a Zulu listener, mentioned above, reported in one of Lars Larsen’s letters: “We understand your words very well, but the thing that you are talking about, we black people cannot well understand.”53 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 translated 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 presuppositions 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 translator 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.



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missionaries among them espoused, they were still, through this very interaction with the missionaries, being introduced to underlying Western hegemonic 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 relatively 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 revolutionary sentiments, but that also steadily served to incorporate the Tswana into a modern society and political economy that was based on colonial inequality. 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 nineteenthcentury 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 missionaries 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 secondly, 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 emphasis 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 missionaries 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 practices, but rather as a more complex effect as several larger processes – including European colonialism, Christian conversion, Yoruba historical

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agency, and the nineteenth-century political economy of the region – played off one another simultaneously: If a metaphor is needed, our history in concrete terms is less like a chain or a ladder, whose links or steps represent phases of economic, cultural, and political change which all correspond, than a multi-colored woolen cord, with component fibers of different lengths – Yoruba, colonial, Christian, and other – that give it structure by pulling both together and against one another. (Peel 2000:9)

Peel’s approach underlines the fact that Ommund Oftebro, Lars and Martha Larsen at Umphumulo were minor actors in a larger picture, to which they contributed, but which in the end was shaped by a range of other forces as well. When attempting to make sense of the Norwegian missionaries’ first activities at Umphumulo, it seems that the above three scholarly approaches all elucidate important aspects. There is yet another dimension to the mission encounter, however, that I wish to dwell on in conclusion. 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 uNkulunkulu? 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 connections. Things hold sets of connections between people, issues, collections of things, and past and present. As we have seen in relation to the missionaries’ rectangular houses, these buildings brought sets of connections to Umphumulo, including the missionaries’ memories of Norway and associated memories of the type of Evangelical Christian communities from which they hailed, attempts to assert “upright” and “decent” visual edifices



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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 materiality (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 thingness (and thus the possible decay) of printed Bibles, and instead emphasize  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 buildings 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 ambivalences 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 parcel of the process of trying to work out how to make God “present,” that is, how to be Christian in the world.

CHAPTER THREE

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 attention 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.



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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 household [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.

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“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 puzzling 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.



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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 puzzled. 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 bodyrelated conflict. A Pregnant Woman In 1854, a small group of mission assistants arrived from Norway: the carpenter 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.

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not attended the Mission School in Stavanger, and were accorded lower status than Hans Schreuder, Lars Larsen, Ommund Oftebro, and Tobias Udland. Their letters were almost never printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende.10 Hans Schreuder decided that Johan and Elise Olsen would work with the Larsens at Umphumulo, while Siver and Thorine Samuelsen and Arnt Tønnesen would join him at a second station that he had been allowed to establish within Zululand, namely Entumeni. Ommund and Guri Oftebro would move to the station at Empangeni to join Tobias and Guri Udland (and the following year, the Udlands moved to Umphumulo). Soon, however, it became clear that Siver and Thorine Samuelsen did not appreciate being with Hans Schreuder at Entumeni. The reasons are slightly unclear, primarily because the only substantial version we have of the events that transpired is Hans Schreuder’s. He told the Board, first, that Thorine Samuelsen had refused to keep house for all of them at Entumeni, as he expected of her, and that Siver Samuelsen had rather sovereignly decided that he and his wife would move to Umphumulo.11 Hans did not mention to the Board, at this point, that Thorine Samuelsen was ill, and that at least some in the missionary group thought she might be pregnant. Instead, he decided to ask Lars Larsen whether he would mind having the Samuelsens at Umphumulo, and that this would mean that Lars would have the added burden of handling the Samuelsens’ financial affairs (and then sending the budget to Hans Schreuder). When Hans rode to Umphumulo in August 1854, his discussion with Lars about the matter, rather predictably, did not go very well. Lars was already sick and tired of the common budget system. And, perhaps more importantly, he does not seem to have been willing to trust Hans to support him if he actually took on responsibility in this matter; on the contrary, based on previous experience, he probably suspected that Hans would turn back on him with admonishing snide comments later on, as had already happened with the Umphumulo budgets. And when Lars Larsen decided to be difficult, he could be very difficult indeed. Hans Schreuder, afterwards, angrily sat down to inform the Board that: here, as later on several occasions, Larsen suggested so many hypothetical situations and difficulties that it was in no way possible for me through my 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.



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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 considerations 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 suggested 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 cooking separately. Lars was not able to hide his curt contempt at Hans’ treatment 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 resignation” 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.

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chapter three 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 genuine 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 associated 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).



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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 meeting 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 couples 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 independently of the Board. The Board, to their credit, managed to take this demonstration 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 sufficient 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.

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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 mission 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 commotion 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 particular 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.



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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, relatives 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 missionary 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 motivation behind the content and style that the missionaries chose for their letters. 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 missionary 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

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across Norway – but also to the missionaries in Natal and Zululand, where they could read the printed extracts of one another’s letters. As can be seen from one of the quotations above, for example, Lars Larsen was able to cite the exact amount of money that Hans Schreuder had spent on an earlier Umphumulo budget because Lars had found the information in “Norsk Missions-Tidende, No. 10, April 1851, 6th volume, p. 167.”27 As early as the mid-1850s, the letter texts and the way they were circulated started to become props in the missionaries’ attempts to claim status and position in relation to one another; they were writing with the knowledge that what they scribbled down about themselves and the other missionaries might be sent back to their colleagues in print. The letters were becoming highly charged objects. This closely scrutinized space of letter-writing was an ambivalent one for the missionaries. It kept them under a certain kind of control from their colleagues, and the Board, but it also presented them with a remarkable opportunity for maneuvering – which they were quick to see and use. The letters provided an excellent opportunity for them to present themselves on their own terms. At times, as can be seen in the examples above, the missionaries were able to pass off a self-censored image and subtle comments on situations in an innocent way, as if their reflections were spontaneous and intimate, merely scribbled down in a personal letter. The Board, too, was able to use the missionary letters. They used them not only as valuable confirmations from the mission field, but also as an effective technique of control over the missionaries; they required them to write regularly, and they chose what to print and what not to print from these letters in Norsk Missions-Tidende, thereby sending a strong message back to the missionaries concerning what kind of writing was deemed appropriate. For example, none of the letter excerpts quoted above concerning the “sofa” and the Samuelsens’ move to Umphumulo were printed in Norsk Missions-Tidende. The Board must also have been well aware of their position as a sort of confidant of the missionaries, who sometimes laid their hearts bare in the letters, given their sometimes lonely existence notes to the Board in this regard, for example Lars Larsen’s footnote on his own letter of May 1856: “With regards to the public use of this report, I wish for it to be printed in its entirety [in Norsk Missions-Tidende]” (NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 7, Lars Larsen to the Board, May 26, 1856). 27 NMS Archives, HA, Box 130, Jacket 4, Lars Larsen to the Board, May 8, 1854. The practice of sending copies of Norsk Missions-Tidende to the missionaries seems to have continued over the next decades, as Lars Larsen also makes reference in 1874 to something he has read in Norsk Missions-Tidende (Norsk Missions-Tidende 1874:126).



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(as will be discussed in chapter 6 on the missionary imagination). The Board always replied as a committee, and thus they at times received personal 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 commitment to the mission project.28 To him, having an exhausted body translated 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 different 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.

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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 competition in self-denial was tied to a larger structure of sentiment in which control 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 control 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 concerning 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 discussion 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 missionary 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).



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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 associated 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 previous chapter, in 1851 Ommund Oftebro and Lars Larsen initially built a oneroom 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 leanto 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 separate “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, confined to a small living space without much privacy, an explicit lack of “comfort,” 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.

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much privacy or comfort, with an open fire, earthen floors, and thatched roofs. Given some of the similarities between the missionary living situation and the Zulu living situation, perhaps it became especially important to the missionaries under these circumstances to find ways of differentiating themselves from the Zulus, for example in their clothes and the rectangular shape of their houses, since the early station environment might otherwise have made them feel that they were being drawn very close to Zulu foods, architecture, and living spaces. The care and effort that the missionaries put into ordering and thinking about difference may, as Ann Laura Stoler (2002:144) notes of others who struggled to maintain differences, be based “on anxieties produced precisely because such crafted differences were not clear at all.” This may also have sharpened the missionaries’ sense of the need for control over their own bodies. They needed to keep themselves intact, and even the mission station, with its ambiguous similarities to Zulu living spaces, could not fully guarantee this intact-ness. The missionaries turned to their own bodies and the bodies of other missionaries, in some cases demanding or demonstrating frugality, and in some cases expecting sexual renunciation (while others ignored this). Although some of them entered into this drama more intensely than others, the question of what exactly constituted bodily self-control and self-denial – and sharp surveillance of whether others were performing such self-denial – seems to have been an important aspect of mission station Christianity among the Norwegian missionaries in the early phase of the 1850s. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that Hans Schreuder should have reacted so strongly to the presence of a pregnant woman, Thorine Samu­ elsen, on his station at Entumeni in 1854. A pregnant woman may refuse to fully deny and exhaust her body. And when Hans pressed the matter, asking her to run the collective household for the station, her husband stepped in to protect her body – and moved them both to Umphumulo, where the Larsens housed and fed them almost in the manner of exiles. In his discussion with Hans about the matter, Lars provocatively pursued the same theme: Did Hans expect him to be responsible for decisions concerning the body of this pregnant woman? Would not such decisions be of such significance that Hans himself ought to make them? This struggle over how significant the pregnancy was, what the body of a pregnant missionary wife should or should not do on the mission station, and who ought to make those decisions, was the trigger for Hans Schreuder’s bitter complaints to Stavanger, and the Board’s subsequent sharp response.



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What threat did Thorine Samuelsen’s pregnant body pose? In an atmosphere of heightened self-control and of alertness to the difficulty of keeping 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 complicated 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 having 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 mid1850s – 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 dressing, 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 conference in South Africa 1886; cited in Tjelle (2010a:64–5 n11).

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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 schemas” – the way our bodies are in the world – are made up of intimate connections 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” living conditions, cordon off private residential spaces, take European medicine, 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, particularly as these were perceived to be sexually marked. Erlank suggests that part of their guarding of European identity was done through affirming its difference from other types of sexual, domestic and living arrangements. 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.



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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 missionaries, 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 manners (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 refinement, 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.

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cultural competencies, including how one fashioned one’s bodily environment, living conditions and social relations. The widespread existence of “poor whites” in the colonies remained a challenge for colonial administrators, who were concerned with establishing differences and categorizations, white prestige and white rule (Stoler 2002:34–8). The Norwegian missionaries felt the discomfort of their “poor white” social standing, and this larger context was one of the factors that played into the defensiveness surrounding the “sofa” at Umphumulo. While Lars Larsen was apparently anxious that the Board might criticize him for having a sofa, since this might be seen to run counter to the pietistic virtues of frugality and worlddenial, he sought to explain to them how awkward it was to be white in the colony without sufficient seating furniture. 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 station 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 missionaries 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 selfsurveillance by requesting timely and detailed letters from the male missionaries 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 sentiments 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



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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 continuously 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 control. 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 inappropriate 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 indistinguishable stream of affective modes.38 As with the colonial agents described by Stoler, the Norwegian missionaries were required to have an appropriate amount of affect that was neither 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 conflicting webs of power: that of the early colonial state, that of the interests of early capitalism, 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 struggle, as manifested in body-related conflicts, which reflected the inherent tensions and contradictions 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.

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think he could forbid it outright. Should missionaries be allowed to display their frustration with other missionaries by moving to a different station, as Thorine and Siver Samuelsen did? The Board thought this was out of place. Was it acceptable to have a “sofa” on the mission station? Lars Larsen thought this was defensible, in the colony, if the “sofa” could be shown to be rudimentary and not overly comfortable, thus being (just) sufficient for seating but not posing any threat of allowing missionaries to over-indulge in comfort or relaxation. The missionaries were under considerable pressure – from the Board, their missionary colleagues, and themselves – to not let their enterprise slip into meaninglessness, and these were some of the ways that they attempted to safeguard the meaning of mission station Christianity. The missionaries themselves, with their own bodies and affects, became the dense transfer points of power of the mission project – and the strains of this position burst into view every once in a while. 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 particular tradition of Christianity. Nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries 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 differed 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 postponed 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 discouraged it. He even wrote a rather strict edict on the matter in 1855, entitled “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.



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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 missionaries’ conceptualization and management of their bodies do not necessarily 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 emotions associated with bodily control among the Norwegian missionaries are reminiscent, for example, of Peter Brown’s (1988) description of bodily control 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 suffering but also the risen Christ. In the early Middle Ages, the most tangible manifestation of this line of thinking was perhaps the gradual establishment 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 poverty, 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 physicality (Bynum 1991:44). While the Norwegian missionaries’ pietistic religiosity did not encourage the extremes touched on here, the tradition of this Christian ideal alerts us to two important dimensions of the missionaries’ relationship to their

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bodies. First, the renunciation and sacrifice that was associated with their relatively poor living standards (relative to other whites, that is), as well as their bodily hardships, served in some sense to confirm their religious calling. Their pietistic Moravian and Haugean backgrounds had given them a strong sense of the bodily suffering of the crucified Christ, and in conveying the news of this suffering it was fitting for them, too, to go through hardship. Their religiously informed body was – at times – living out its calling through frugality and self-denial (cf. Csordas 1994:25). Second, the missionaries too experienced the double-sided nature of physicality within Christianity: in some ways they renounced the physical, in other ways they reveled in it (cf. Tjelle 2011:92). Even as Hans Schreuder issued his strictest warnings concerning the disadvantages of having children in the mission field in 1855, three of the other missionary couples got pregnant and had babies in 1854–55. Moreover, having a physically fit body was often important on the mission stations. On the one hand, the body was a source of trouble, but on the other hand, it was also the means that the missionaries used to build and tend to the purpose of their lives. On the one hand, the missionaries were at times anxious about the manifest corporeality of their work and consistently termed this the “exterior work” rather than “real mission work,” but on the other hand, they took great pride in the ongoing building projects on their mission stations and in the fields and gardens that they cultivated. On the one hand, voluntary poverty and suffering in the mission field was deemed part of their calling, but on the other hand, what was actually needed in the mission field was often strength and energy. 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 presence of white women among colonial agents aroused strong protective instincts on the part of the white men, ostensibly against the perceived



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threat of black men to these white women. Among the first Norwegian male missionaries, however, this does not seem to have been a marked tendency. 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 continued 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 willing  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 indulgence 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.

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confused battles and intense resentment and anger over one another’s bodily practices that had prevailed during the first half of the 1850s abated a little, and did not reach the same pitch within the Norwegian missionary group for the rest of the period under study. But self-control was still held to be important, and still led to many practices of self-denial. These were incorporated more evenly into everyday life on the mission stations, as the missionaries sought to delineate the stations as particular moral domains, to hold themselves together as their religiously informed bodies learned to live in this new space, and to establish that the mission stations were indeed different from their surroundings.

CHAPTER FOUR

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 convert. 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 definite 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.

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office in Stavanger (Tjelle 2011:115 n498). The event was preserved in popular memory at Umphumulo too; during the time that my family lived there in the 1980s and early 1990s, only two figures from the early era of Norwegian mission were “physically” present: a portrait of Hans Schreuder hung in the Bishop’s offices at the Umphumulo Church Center, and when a new hall of residence was opened for female students at the Umphumulo Lutheran Theological Seminary, it was named Mathenjwaze Shange, after the young woman who was baptized in 1858. Following Mathenjwaze’s baptism in 1858, seven converts were baptized at Umphumulo in 1859, and three at Empangeni.3 Each year after that, a relatively small number of baptisms was reported from the Norwegian mission to the Zulus. The majority of the converts were recruited from among the young men and women who were employed on the mission stations. And after their conversion, most of the converts stayed on the mission stations (or later moved on to other mission stations), setting up a home on the station area – whether by building a beehive hut or an “upright” house. It was not unusual for a convert to marry another convert. Some of them had children, and some took in relatives to live with them. The nature of the mission station space continued to change with these developments. By the mid-1860s the gardens at Umphumulo were surrounded by a handful of square houses that had been built or were in the process of being built by some of the Zulu converts on the station.4 Despite the fact that the instructions from the Board in Stavanger urged the Norwegian missionaries, in their interaction with these converts, “as soon as possible to seek to educate some children so that they can be […] your future co-workers,”5 and to “seek to train African converts as pastors and native assistants,”6 the missionaries hesitated on this point. In fact, they did not see fit to ordain a Zulu pastor until 1893, when they finally, after much delay, ordained a convert called Simon Ndlela.7 This first ordination was not even mentioned in the Norwegian missionary superintendent Ole Stavem’s annual report for that year (Tjelle 2011:140), and does not seem to have made any impact on NMS as an organization. Simon Ndlela was suspended from service by the Norwegian missionary conference ten years later, and there were no more African pastors in the Norwegian mission 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).



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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 converts in the 1850s were greeted with such joy and were considered so important 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 discussing 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 conversion 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:

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a white woman, Martha, and a black man, Mbiyana.8 Mathenjwaze had worked for Lars and Martha Larsen for around four years; in practice, this meant that she had worked with and for Martha, since Martha supervised the work of young girls in their household and also held daily reading classes with them.9 During the time that Mathenjwaze worked for Martha, she came to know Mbiyana Ngidi, who had been employed at Umphumulo as the mission’s “wagon driver” (Vogndriver) since the station was set up. And although it is not made much of in the missionary letters, it seems important to note that on June 7th, 1858, the day after her baptism, Mathenjwaze Shange was married to Mbiyana Ngidi at Umphumulo.10 Gareth Griffiths (2005), in his analysis of the conversion narratives of previous slaves in East and Central Africa from the period 1870–1920, notes that the narratives that he has examined often lead up to baptism, and then end rather abruptly. It is as if the stories that were sent back to mission  journals and periodicals in Europe and North America functioned mainly to frame the converts against their “heathen” background, and once they had converted they “disappear from narrative possibility” (Griffiths 2005:167). In general, I have not found this to be the case with the conversion narratives recorded by the Norwegian missionaries, since a significant number of narratives continued over several years as missionaries charted the difficulties and “backsliding” of various converts. It is, however, true of the conversion story of Mathenjwaze Shange. After her baptism and marriage to Mbiyana, we hear curiously little about her. Here she was caught behind a double narrative obscurity: she was now baptized, and she was now married. The fact that the number of years that preceded her baptism  is still remembered in Norway, and that her name was still used at Umphumulo in the early 1990s, stands in stark contrast to the absence of information about the actual woman, Mathenjwaze Shange, in the missionary sources. The silence concerning her continuing journey mirrors two other silences, namely the absence of information about Martha Larsen and Mbiyana Ngidi. Lars Berge later wrote that “it is almost impossible to speak 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.



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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 station. 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 history 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 mission 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 narrative 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.

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What do we learn about Mbiyana, then, if we enter “through the looking glass of the Norwegian sources” (Drønen 2009:72)? The Norwegian missionary 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 rectangular 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 station. 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 stations 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.



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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 undecidable; 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 missionaries (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 historical 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 inconsistencies, 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.

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discussed in the missionary letters: Why was Mbiyana considered a wagon driver by the Norwegian missionaries, but offered the position of missionary by the Americans? Or, conversely: if he wanted to be a (paid) evangelist, why had he not been offered this position at Umphumulo? The Norwegian missionaries do not seem to have employed paid Zulu evangelists at all during the 1850s, 60s or early 70s. Torstein Jørgensen has found that in addition to Mbiyana, who led evening devotions, only a few rare attempts were made during this period at employing Zulus as teachers for the mission station classes, and a minimal number of references exist to (unpaid) Zulus actually evangelizing.17 In 1875 one Zulu convert, namely Simon Ndlela, was trusted enough to evangelize on his own, at an outstation (Tjelle 2011:114). It was not until the 1880s, after the Anglo-Zulu War, that the number of indigenous teachers, evangelists, and outstations in the Norwegian mission started to increase.18 Any activities that placed Christian Zulus in positions of spiritual authority were probably under-reported by the Norwegian missionaries. Nevertheless, it is striking how few opportunities Christian Zulus were given in terms of spiritual responsibility on the Norwegian mission stations during the first three decades of the mission, from around 1850–1880. We may perhaps speculate, then, reading the missionaries’ letters a century and a half later, that Mbiyana Ngidi’s decision to move to the Americans in order to become a missionary may be a silent comment on the lack of opportunities for African converts to be recognized and trusted as spiritual leaders – especially, in this case, on the Norwegian stations. As Griffiths puts it: “Although the voices of the missionized ‘subjects’ may seem to have got rather lost in these ventriloquized texts, read against the grain they reveal traces of the silenced voices of the converted colonized subject” (Griffiths 2005:155). Read against the grain, Mbiyana Ngidi and Mathenjwaze Shange’s departure from Umphumulo may perhaps point to a certain hesitancy that had started to manifest itself among the Norwegian missionaries regarding how to relate to converts on the mission stations – even a trusted, loyal and skilled convert with a convert wife. 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 indicates  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 century. The number of outstations also grew rapidly in the 1880s and had reached 29 by 1890,



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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 success in terms of gathering converts. Norman Etherington includes two telling 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 thousands.”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).

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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 disagreements. At his ordination in 1878 he was even commended for his orthodoxy in the face of traditional customs, which probably included his opposition  to polygamy, lobola (bridewealth exchange), and utshwala (communal  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 convert 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 missionaries. 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



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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 relation 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: missionary 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 pastors. He points out that the missionaries carried with them high expectations 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 converts  beyond the classes held at the mission stations (with one striking 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.

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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 training, 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 mission at Oscarsberg (Tjelle 2011:135–6).25 This was 54 years after the first baptism in the Norwegian mission. It is not at all apparent, therefore, that high educational standards was a pressing concern for the Norwegian missionaries 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 theological 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 baptized 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 seminary 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 conference 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).



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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 humiliating treatment” (2011:143) he received from the Norwegian missionaries, the delay of his ordination until 1893, his low wages compared to the missionaries, 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 converts 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 dealings 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 converts who were, on the whole, in doctrinal agreement with the missionaries. 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).

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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 constructed 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 missionary 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 reluctance 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 partially as children – supervised, taught, told to live together, given a timetable 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



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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 “missionaries” (Missionær) or “mission pastors” (Missionsprest), allowing them to perform 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 status 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 responsibility,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 withheld for over a decade, were not keen on delegating what religious authority 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 mission 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.

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been back in Europe; here he was also a white father figure, as distinct from his black congregation, and he usually also controlled the land they lived on and had direct authority over their household affairs, within a bounded community (as will be discussed further in the following chapter). This caused the inequality that attended the paternalistic hierarchy to be more keenly felt and to have more long-standing consequences for those who came within its orbit on the mission stations in Southern Africa than for those who experienced it in Europe. 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 missionaries 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 missionaries 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 MissionsTidende 1873:299–301.)



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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 communication 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 missionaries 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 MissionsTidende 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.

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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 letters, 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 contradiction 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 ethnicized subjects who would forever remain different, and therefore subordinate, 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, policies and actions that together made up, unevenly, the British colonial state in Natal. The two identities that were held out to Africans were at crosspurposes – 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 community, 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 distance from the British missionaries, while the latter prevaricated over whether to find paid positions for them and what kind of relationship to



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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 disgruntled 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 cautious. 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 converts to gain equal status in the church. This general trend persisted until the mid-twentieth century wave of “spiritual decolonization,” when mission 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 hesitancy and ambivalence that the missionaries do not seem to have anticipated. 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 background 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’ continued sincerity?

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chapter four 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 evangelists were on the whole more effective than Western missionaries in gaining 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 history of Christianity in South Africa is separate from the history of missionary 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 indigenous African communicators, preachers and mission agents nuance any black-and-white image of mission as only being transmitted by white people (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.



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missions in Southern Africa. They point out that it was used as a cornerstone 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 relationship  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 misleading 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 teaching 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

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of religion has overly colored previous anthropological descriptions and understandings of religious identity. The critique of this perspective emphasizes that a more diverse range of forms, expressions and experiences of religion should come to the fore, including the importance of, for example, communal religious experiences, inhabited religious spaces, sensory and embodied ritual, the use of repetition and rhetoric, and so on (Asad 1993, Robbins 2007:14). Galina Lindquist and Simon Coleman (2008) have argued that rather than regarding belief as a concept that is “good to think with,” we should view it as “good to think against” – as we grapple with it, challenge it, and view it from different angles. Let me think against belief, then, on the mission stations, as I try to understand some of the meaning for the people involved. One of the most immediately graspable distinctions concerning how differently Christian belief can operate is the one highlighted by Joel Robbins (2007:14–15) between Christians who underscore the importance of “believing that,” and those who also, or instead, tend toward accentuating the centrality of “believing in.” Believing that – e.g. “I believe that God exists” – is a proposition and a truth claim, a state of mind or mental assent, which carries with it the alternative possibility that some might believe that God does not exist. Believing in, on the other hand, shifts the focus toward commitment; believing in God is an act that implies that one has trust in God, has faith in God. While the Norwegian missionaries to some extent wished to encompass both of these aspects of belief within their Christianity, they started out by trying to convince the Zulus that they should convert by changing their “beliefs that” the shades, amadlozi, existed. For example, Hans Schreuder initially wished that the Zulus would take on a new set of cognitive beliefs, so that they would “believe that” the shades were imaginary and unreal, while the Christian God was real (Jørgensen 1990:151). Soon, however, the missionaries in Natal and Zululand, including the Norwegians, also seem to have been quick to pick up and use the language of religious power and efficacy – that is, arguing that their God was more effective and more powerful than any potential rivals, such as the shades, and therefore was the better ally to “believe in” (Worger 2001). This brought missionary Christianity closer to Zulu understandings. In practice, the Zulus who converted seem to have primarily shifted their spiritual allegiance (who they “believed in”) rather than radically changing their cognitive beliefs (what they “believed that”). For example, in 1868 the Norwegian missionary Hans Christian Leisegang reported overhearing one



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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 traditional 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 missionaries – 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 convert, 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 negotiated, 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. .

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chapter four Conversion as Continuity and Discontinuity

Motivations for converts’ changes in allegiance or “belief” (whether “believing 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 considered 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 conversation 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 century, 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 becoming 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 further 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.



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“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 beginning, 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 frustration for nineteenth century European missionaries who drew sharp mental boundaries between believers and pagans.

This does indeed seem to be the case for many converts and potential converts 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 traditional 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 underlying 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.

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been unusual for a Zulu convert to “believe that” the shades existed and that, in some cases, it was even still prudent to consult with the shades through an isangoma, a diviner – while for the most part the convert might have found it prudent to consult with the Christian God. Some of the practices that the missionaries demonstrated for them also bore certain marks of continuity with other Zulu customs. For example, the Zulu term used for Christian prayer was ukukuleka, which otherwise meant the act of paying obeisance, often on one’s knees, to a king or chief (Döhne 1857:176–7 and Doke 1990:362, English–Zulu, cited in Worger 2001:442 n98). The converts were asked to pray to uNkulunkulu. It seems fair to assume that they filtered the “new” practice of Christian prayer through previously learned associations with kneeling, paying obeisance, and previous associations to the name uNkulunkulu (a varied term, as discussed in chapter 2). At the same time, Joel Robbins (2007) has cautioned that if we overemphasize the gradings of a continuum and continuity, we lose sight of the important point that in most cases of Christian conversion, discontinuity is stressed by both the convert and the Christian community in question. Conversion is often conceptualized as a rupture or a break, a new start. Indeed, the Zulu term wela points to an element of a marked transition, a discontinuous element, a crossing. The same is true of the reference to “introducing a new custom,” and the use of a separate denotation, ikholwa, for those who had converted. Rather than choosing only one of these basic approaches – continuum, continuity or discontinuity – it seems most judicious to me to explore conversions as polysemic events (Pritchett 2011:45). The image of marked transition, of crossing over, may be just as useful here as the image of a slippery continuum. As will be discussed further below, in the section on third space, the multi-layered process of Zulu encounters with the mission stations may have encompassed both an aspect of growing differentiation, an emerging conceptualization of transitions and different “worlds,” as well as an aspect of more hybrid, muddled innovations that played on continuities with both Zulu and missionary culture. As Elizabeth Elbourne (2002:173– 88) notes, African conversions, both on and off the mission stations, revolved around a complex interplay of rejection, reevaluation, appropriation, and transformation of various practices and thought models. Given this complexity, and the awareness that embodied religious understandings and meanings are both polysemic for one given individual and also clearly colored by the cultural context and its generic learned associations, what does this tell us about the new religion of the convert?



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Is it the “same” religion as the religion of people who have been participating 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 scrutinized 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.

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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 quotations show, the Norwegian missionaries felt that they also needed other outward signs in order to assess something as intangible as inner conversion. 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 potential converts were attentive during classes on the mission stations and sermons.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 during 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.



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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 special 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 system of signification imposed from without. From the beginning clothing 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 neighbors 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.

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so on. But did this aid or hinder the type of content that the missionaries wished for the Zulus to associate with this form of clothing? In 1872, a few years after he had arrived in Southern Africa, the Norwegian missionary Ole Stavem reported a conversation with a Zulu woman who told him that she had believed for a long time, though he doubted “the authenticity of her faith.” She then pointed to some outward signs to convince him, namely that she attended Sunday services and did not get drunk on beer. Ole Stavem was not convinced, and rejoined by stating that “faith does not consist in the putting on of trousers or wearing the clothes of the whites, so she could continue wearing leather skirts without therefore becoming lost [i.e. non-Christian].” And he added, in a humorous tone, that upon hearing this she “completely discounted my right to express doubts concerning her faith,” since she apparently thought his views quite wrong. The conversation left them both where they had started: she was still insistent that she had several outward signs to point to in order to prove her belief; he deemed her inauthentic.55 But the fact that he became entangled in this argument marks one of the processes in which the missionaries, almost without noticing it, it seems, lost some of the control that they wished to have over the definition of the form and content of Christianity. They wished for the Zulus who had converted to Christianity to wear European clothes, because in their minds this was the Christian thing to do – it was associated with Christian civilization and propriety – but not because the clothes made one a Christian. The missionaries simultaneously tried to underline that the European clothes signified the presence of Christianity on the mission station, but that clothes in themselves did not embody the presence of Christianity. To the missionaries the relationship between form and content in this case did not seem overly complicated; clothes had not been contested objects in this sense in Norway. As Kirsten Rüther notes in relation to the German Hermannsburg and Berlin Mission Societies in the Transvaal, clothes had never received elaborate theological reflection, and precisely therefore they can provide an alternative insight into mission station dynamics. Clothing “offers us an understanding of how historical agents developed a set of complex personal relationships with each other” (Rüther 2002:378). Because of the missionaries’ actions and interactions – and despite their words (Jørgensen 1990:164–5) – clothes became intimately tied to both ideas of Christian civilizing progress and conversion on the mission stations. The meaning of one of the outer forms 55 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:369.



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of Christianity had de facto changed on the stations, as some of the converts 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 mission 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 missionaries’ 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, evildoers, 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 person – as one Zulu diviner told Berglund: “The name is that person. They are the same, the name and the person” (Berglund 1976:292).

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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 matters 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 station, the Norwegian missionaries reported that they were encouraging candidates for baptism to choose Zulu names rather than Norwegian ones if they wished to take on a new baptismal name – with apparently little success. For example, in 1871 the Norwegian missionary Ole Stavem listed eight baptized converts, all of whom had been baptized with a European or biblical 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 encouraged 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 missionaries 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.



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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 missionaries 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 communicated by Europeans without aspiring to become European. For those converts 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.

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chapter four 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, meddling 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 conversions 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 foreseen, 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 suddenly became, in one sense, out of place, and where the meanings of their bodily schemas and material attachments became contested and de-centered, 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



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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 particularly 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 discussion 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.

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Christianities are syncretisms, as the Comaroffs (1997:58) have also pointed out. In addition, when using the term “hybridization” in relation to the missionary encounter, it is helpful to keep in mind that creolization is, “in varying 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 obvious ways. For example, whether the missionaries liked it or not, some people 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 conversion as a social process of initiation or socialization. The convert is socialized 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 identification. 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 process of identification (Rutherford 1990:211). He thinks of the process of identifying 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



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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 communication 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 conflicted 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 identification. 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 stations, and in the early 1890s chose to institute some rules in order to limit what they regarded as the converts’ pretentiousness and proclivity to fashion. 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

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example, allowed to wear silk dresses; missionary wives, on the other hand, were allowed to wear silk if they wished (Rüther 2002:370). As long as the German missionaries thought African employees or converts were wearing European clothes to differentiate themselves from other, non-Christian Africans, it was easy for them to approve. But as soon as they started to suspect that Africans were using clothes to appear like, and perhaps to try to be like, the missionaries or other Europeans, they became critical. It seems to me that some of the same unease started to appear among the Norwegian missionaries, around the same time. Perhaps it is even evident in Ole Stavem’s remark, mentioned above, in which he tells a woman that putting on European clothes is not the same as becoming a Christian, and that, as a Zulu, she could continue to wear leather skirts and still be saved.63 It seems to me that this remark must have put the woman in a difficult situation, and that it was – whether intentionally or not – part of what Anne Folke Henningsen (2011) has termed the missionaries’ “double bind communication.”64 Henningsen argues that the Moravian missionaries’ conflicting messages create situations in which the black Moravians cannot win: if they display association with whiteness, they are in danger of “losing their authenticity” and can thus no longer be considered authentic black subjects, and if they insist on displaying what is considered racial difference, they become unintelligible as legitimate Moravian subjects. (Henningsen 2011:132, orig. emph.)65

Ole Stavem’s interlocutor may have found herself in this type of situation. If she insisted that European clothing was indeed part and parcel of Christian conversion, she would at best be regarded by the missionary as ignorant or confused, and at worst as pretentious and insincere. But if she agreed with Ole that she could hypothetically wear traditional dress and still be a Christian, she would be regarded by the missionary as someone who had not yet learnt to appreciate or model appropriate forms of civilization, and 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 independent; 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.



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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 menaces 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 missionaries 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 appropriately 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 eliminated. I am thinking of their continual talking with laughter and noise, the proposals between the boys and girls, their inability to handle misunderstandings and conflicts in a Christian manner, their lack of readiness to protect 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.

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this way? His statement remains uncertain: he hopes that these traits can be eliminated, yet he also thinks that they are undoubtedly part of the Zulus’ “very character.” The uncertainty around how to think of the black Christians on the stations forced both Africans and missionaries to re-cognize themselves and others. In Ommund’s eyes, the converts were pretentious in relation to the missionary and inclined to arrogance – he thought they were making themselves out to be more important than they actually were, perhaps because he felt they were making stabs at equality with the missionary. A re-cognition of the missionaries’ (lack of complete) authority occurred, as well as a re-cognition of the (very limited) authority that missionaries felt able to entrust to Zulu Christians. Scant attention has been given to theorizing this missionary experience of coming to recognize oneself as holding on to authority as European or white over against African or black Christians (cf. Comaroffs 1997:19; though see Erlank 2001). This becomes especially pertinent in the context of conversion, in which converts are initially encouraged to identify with the missionary, but then – as the process of identification evolves – the missionary may start to feel the menace inherent in identification: the threat of gaining an equal. Nicholas Thomas (1994:40) has criticized Homi Bhabha for reifying colonial hierarchies even as he proposes to disarticulate them. This is indeed a danger when analyzing the exchanges on the mission stations; I do not wish to slip into a discourse that reifies the Norwegian missionaries as straightforwardly part of the “colonizing class(es).” In the midst of the processes of re-cognition, of establishing and protecting proper mission station Christianity and authority and thinking about what it meant to be “European” and “African,” the Norwegian missionaries themselves did not fit into an easy categorization of being part of “the colonizers” in Southern Africa. As discussed in chapters 1 and 3, the Norwegian missionaries too were sometimes regarded as “white but not quite” by other whites. Ann Laura Stoler (1995:102, 2002) suggests that a large segment of those classified as European in the colonies fell into this uncertain category, such as the large portion of poor whites, in addition to people of mixed racial origin, or colonized European-educated intellectuals, or European children born and brought up in the colonies. “European-ness” and “white-ness” became matters not of skin color alone, but of “tenuously balanced assessments of who was judged to act with reason, affective appropriateness, and a sense of morality” (Stoler 2002:6). While the missionaries were tenuously demarcating hierarchies on the mission stations, we should not assume that they were automatically accorded the same ranks in the colonial hierarchy by other groups.



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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 dissonance 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 different space. The hybrid moment comes when elements of, say, two previous 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 colonial context came together on the mission stations to create “something else besides” – a mission station Christianity marked by the converts’ negotiation 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 expression 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

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as “European.” The discussion so far would affirm this argument – but it would also, I think, take it one step further. Indeed there was a “world of difference” (Comaroffs 1991:206) between the Umphumulo mission station and its Zulu surroundings. But there is also no doubt that there was a world of difference between the station at Umphumulo and the houses and churches and way of life that the Norwegian missionaries remembered from Norway. The mission station that they had created – and that now the converts and others were co-creating – was something distinct from both worlds, while shaped by both of them; it was third space. We therefore gain new perspectives on it when it is understood both as a dawning (colonial) separation of two cultures and as a third space that will not easily unravel back into the two perceived sides. This is brought out more clearly in a second quote: The second volume [Comaroffs 1997] is more preoccupied than the first with hybridity: with the processes of cultural appropriation and admixture that occurred on all sides, and on the middle grounds of the colonial encounter. (Comaroffs 2001:113, orig. emph.)

In this quote, the Comaroffs point out that they wish to pay attention not just to the gradual delination between “European” and “African” ways of being in nineteenth-century Southern Africa, but also to the messy processes of “cultural appropriation and admixture” that took place in this colonial situation. They wish not only to sketch out the contours of historical processes, but also to “complicate them over the long run” (Comaroffs 2001:113). It is an approach that aims to point to tensions within the untidy historical process of the gradual European colonization of Southern Africa, and to view it from different vantage points. Thus the Comaroffs have highlighted how the concepts of “Western ways” (sekgoa) and “Tswana ways” (setswana) gradually took shape and became established as meaningful binary terms precisely in the midst of several encounters and experiences that also problematized these terms, that pointed to how the ways of missionaries and Tswana overlapped and were being influenced by each other. Boundaries and assymetries of power were being drawn even as – and perhaps also precisely because – multiple mediations complicated and problematized them. Form and Content In the Norwegian preface to his edited volume on nineteenth-century Norwegian mission, Jarle Simensen (1984b:5) says that despite the



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“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 endeavours to transmit the Christian religion to the Zulus” – in other words, “the process of religious change and continuity” – and that this “differ[s] considerably” 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 Europeanstyle 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 manifest  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 nineteenth-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

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sought to carry out both.67 As Skeie suggests, they wished to reach the invisible, the thoughts, emotions and inclinations of the people around them, and much of their work utilized visible, material means in order to do so. They had to rely on constant scrutiny of external forms, such as discourse  and clothes, in order to gauge the progress and sincerity of their converts – external forms and signs that were, in the end, never fully reliable. Rather than trying to keep more “inwardly” religious processes separate from more “outwardly” material and corporal concerns, then, the missionaries constantly sought to bring these two together, in what proved to be a continuing challenge. This returns us, in conclusion, to the challenge of trying to unpack some of the complex relationship between outer form and inner content or meaning in mission station Christianity. As mentioned in chapter 1, Joel Robbins (2007:8–9) critiques the Comaroffs’ (1991, 1997) distinction between form and content. One of the Comaroffs’ underlying themes concerns how the Tswana frequently rejected the content of the missionaries’ message, yet were steadily enmeshed in the Western forms that they brought with them, including forms of knowing, arguing, speaking, keeping time, working, being, and so on. Robbins (2007:8) argues that given the broad definition of forms, or of media, in the Comaroffs’ study, “the only thing that clearly is not form is the logic of Christianity.” This sets up a distinction between form and content that seems to be constituted by what the Tswana did and did not adopt; whatever they did not commonly adopt is categorized as the “content” of the religious message, and whatever they did adopt is assumed to be “form” – a point that is also raised by Peel (1995:588–9). Robbins queries this definition of Christianity as “content,” and I agree with his reference to Hayden White (1987) that when examining culture, forms are part of the content. It seems to me that it is helpful to recognize that the particular spaces of the mission stations, and the understandings of Christianity tied to these spaces, were especially prone to using forms in order to communicate content, eliding form and content, changing the meaning of forms, triggering disagreements and negotiations over the disputed meanings of the content of forms, and so on. The missionaries arrived with a set of learned relationships between content and forms, between outer appearances (including 67 See e.g. Hans Schreuder’s use of these terms: “Not only has the real mission work suffered, but also the secular work of building a church and residential house” (Norsk MissionsTidende 1858:218).



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their own living arrangements, gardens, clothing, and bodily postures), and their inner emotional and somatic responses, thought patterns and intentions, 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 subject who expends much energy on creating sincere interior states and expressing these in language, “retains a material and social body, […] continues to work on, transact, possess, and know itself through objects, […] is surrounded by social others” (Keane 2002:84). Objects continue to pose different problems for different subjects (Keane 1998:13), and part of my intention 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 “misunderstood,” 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 missionaries’ 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 mission 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 baptisms 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

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the missionaries had witnessed in Norway. On the stations in Natal and Zululand, the problem of new members was heightened considerably due to the three factors discussed here, namely missionary paternalism, colonial “double vision,” and the Protestant problem of gauging sincerity – which all played out quite differently on the stations in Southern Africa than in Norwegian parishes. While these three sets of reasons were all initiated by the missionaries, the effects that they produced resulted in a mission station Christianity that was no longer solely created by, or under the full control of, the missionaries – even as they strove to maintain their authority.

CHAPTER FIVE

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 established, 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 resident 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 establishment of “family schools” on stations, allowing for groups of youth to remain on the station in the hopes of converting them. Other Americans, including 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 stations.  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 people 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.

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chapter five 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 stations, which were seen variously as spaces for services and exchange, as risky spaces, as esikoleni (school), as resident communities, as rival homesteads, 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 missionaries. 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, especially 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, thermometers, forks and knives, clocks, lamps and candles, window panes, 2 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1864:30–31.



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sugar and coffee. They were sites where news of political developments could be gleaned, and where Zulus might learn more about the relationships 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 frequenting 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 missionaries  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 missionaries could offer meant that the mission stations became busy with everyday visitors. In the early 1870s Ommund Oftebro wrote from the mission 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.

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missionaries. For example, the Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland reported from Empangeni in 1865 that people who wished to sell something to him would often inquire: “Did you not notice me here sonda-ing [attending the Sunday service] yesterday,”4 and several other missionaries recorded similar exchanges. As this quotation indicates, the act of attending Sunday services had come to be referred to in Zulu by a specific verb: to sonda. The missionaries often used this term in their letters when reporting conversations with station visitors, as in the example above. And while they on the whole tried their best to discourage the Sunday service attendees from thinking that their sonda-ing would make the missionaries more inclined, for example, to buy their corn, it is clear that the Zulus did gain some benefits from their attendance (Jørgensen 1990:230), if nothing else simply by being known to the missionary. And while most of the Norwegian missionaries were adamant that attendance at Sunday services ought not to be overtly tied to any form of material exchange, there are rare examples of the missionaries themselves entering into this process of negotiation. For example, in 1872 the Norwegian missionary Markus Dahle at the mission station Imfule threatened that he would cease to provide medical and other services to people in the neighborhood if they would not even start to count the days so that they would know when it was Sunday, and would come to the service on the station. Apparently his threats had some effect.5 The process of exchange that surrounded the Sunday services was not unusual among nineteenth-century missions. Justin Willis (1993:142–3), in his article on the mission stations set up by Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in Bonde (now Tanzania), notes that for many people in Bonde regular attendance at the British missionaries’ Sunday services seems to have become a means of claiming the mission as a patron. In the complex systems of clientage that made up the social fabric in nineteenth-century Bonde, clients could claim the physical or spiritual protection of one or more patrons by becoming their dependants, and by accepting, amongst other things, that the patron performed some religious rituals on their behalf. This structure of loyalty and dependence established a relation­ ship of obligation. While there are differences between nineteenth-century Natal and Zululand and nineteenth-century Bonde, the Zulus also recognized structures of political and religious loyalty, and the missionaries did in many ways fall into the role of a potential (and rival) patron – as I shall 4 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1865:5. 5 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:165–6.



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comment futher on below. Many of the Zulus, too, came to see their attendance 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, drawing 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 reasonable 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.

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experts with esoteric knowledge, who moreover claimed a special connection to the powers of heaven (Landau 2010a:421–2). The Norwegian missionaries in general consented to pray for rain when they were asked (see e.g. Hans Schreuder’s first – and successful – attempt at bringing rain).10 Lars Larsen was considered by some Zulus to be a successful rainmaker both at Umphumulo and later during his temporary stay at Empangeni.11 One of his neighbors at Umphumulo commented in 1858: “You merely tell the Lord in Heaven, and then the clouds are there.”12 The Norwegian missionaries were not alone in this activity. In the 1850s the British missionary John Ross, at the mission station Pirie in the Eastern Cape, was appar­ ently renowned as a rainmaker even beyond the Cape frontier (MacKenzie 2003:127). Other missionaries had similar reputations (Comaroffs 1991:211– 12, Etherington 1978:52, Hodgson 1997:70, MacKenzie 2003:127). Paul Landau (2010a:422) argues that the missionaries typically entered onto “alien epistemological terrain” in rainmaking engagements or even discussions. To a large extent, this is a point well taken. However, there are some nuances. The terrain of rainmaking was not completely alien to the missionaries, since they had biblical precedent for praying for rain,13 and they would not initially have consented to this activity if they had not believed it compatible with a Christian approach. At the same time, they were being drawn into local understandings of the link between rituals and rain. The missionaries thus came to play on the importance of rain ceremonies in Southern Africa. Among the Zulus, the king’s ritual powers were held to be especially important in procuring rain, though he also allowed a relatively small number of rainmakers to operate in his territory, and even consulted with rainmakers from neighboring peoples when deemed necessary (Berglund 1976:53). The missionaries’ Africanized role as rainmakers was therefore one of some status. How are we to understand these consultations and negotiations over medicines and rain, in which the missionaries took on new roles? The missionaries regarded the basic medical assistance that they offered as part of their “outer work” (det ydre Arbeide) or “secular work” (det seculære Arbeide) 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 availeth 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.”



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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 natural 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 development of Protestantism and the Enlightenment in Western Europe over the previous centuries. Instead, the actions of the missionaries seem rather to have communicated 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 various 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 transactions, 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.

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missionaries – that attending Sunday services could constitute one half of a transaction (Simensen 1986b:88). But on the whole it seems to me that transaction theory is a far too limiting theoretical framework to use in order to understand the dynamics between the missionaries and the Zulus on the mission stations. This will become more evident in the following sections, which deal with how the mission stations also became constructed by the Zulus as, for example, risky spaces or rival spaces – ideas which are resonant with meanings that go beyond questions of need satisfaction. But even if we were to dwell only on the area of exchanges, it is clear from the above brief discussion that the exchanges on the mission stations did not just satisfy, or fail to satisfy, needs. They also had unanticipated impacts on the parties to the exchange. A process of mutual testing and appropriation of knowledge and roles, or at least attempts at appropriation, was going on. In colonial situations we are familiar with examining how the colonized start to mimic the colonizers – as when, for example, Africans in Natal and Zululand started appropriating European clothes and European names (as discussed in the previous chapter). But here I wish to note that mimicry can go both ways in a colonial context (cf. Andrews 2007). In their everyday consultations and exchanges with Zulus on the mission stations, the Norwegian missionaries came to mimic certain aspects of the roles of Zulu herbalists or diviners or rainmakers, while also emphasizing the superiority of Western medicine, Christian prayer, and the Word of God. This does not seem to have been so much a deliberate transaction strategy as an attempt at fitting their message, sometimes in an ad hoc way, into a foreign environment. 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:



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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 missionaries 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 letting 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.

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through the mouth and to dwell in the stomach. Expulsion of fluids, whether through vomiting or expelling faeces, cleansed the stomach from this poison. Vomiting could also be taken as a symbol of innocence since it expressed the opposite of harboring evil, which was a serious matter. The same understanding of the relationship between ingesting evil – from the missionaries – and purifying oneself through vomiting seems to have been at work among the Zulus around the Norwegian mission stations in the nineteenth century. At other times a young person’s wish to become a Christian was perceived to be a more innocent craze or whim. For example, a young male catechumen at Umphumulo who had become engaged to a female convert at the station was told by his parents that they would only pay the bridewealth, lobola, to the young woman’s father if he and the young woman would move away from the mission station and give up “the ‘whim’ of becoming an ikolwa.”19 It seems that some of the converts spoke in their own words – at least as reported by the missionaries – of experiencing the Christian message as something that “passes into the heart,” as Maqamusela at Eshowe reportedly put it.20 Umvuzane at Umphumulo is reported to have described conversion as follows: “one truth after the other entered into my heart until at last I was conquered by the truth.”21 Lars Larsen wrote that a young man at Inhlazatshe told him: “It has now been a month since the Word began to enter into my heart; now I wish to learn.”22 And a catechumen at Umphumulo, Utotongwane, stated that the reason he wished to sign up for catechumen classes was that “his heart had been aroused with power, and he now wanted to get washed.”23 These reported statements by Zulus are not necessarily accurate, as they have been recorded in the context of a stylized narrative in the missionary letters, and we do not know exactly what the speakers said or what they meant by it. They may have used phrases that they had picked up from the missionaries and repeated back to them. However, they may also give us some hints about Zulu attentiveness to processes whereby one’s body could be “passed into,” “entered into,” or “aroused,” by other powers. Thinking in terms of this kind of “punctured subjectivity” (Landau 2010a:443) was also a way of denying culpability and 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.



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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 something 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 paying 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 threehour 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 missionaries (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.

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thought to have an especially acute ability to communicate with the shades, and they were employed to “smell out” evil-doers (Berglund 1976: 185). Perhaps it was a disturbing thought to many people that the missionaries seemed to be foreign diviners, comparable to the isanusi, who had now settled in northern Natal and within the borders of Zululand, and who were working with foreign spiritual powers. Moreover, the missionaries were outspoken about how strongly they opposed many key aspects of Zulu society, including polygamous marriage and the rituals related to the shades, amadlozi, and it does not seem farfetched if many Zulus drew the conclusion that the missionaries might use their spiritual power to oppose the amadlozi and to work evil and destruction among the Zulus (cf. Porterfield 1997:72). Thus Hans Schreuder reported that the Norwegian missionaries inside Zululand were commonly referred to as isilwane (animal; Hans reported that it held connotations of “dangerous creature”) and umthakathi (evil-doer) during the first decade, the 1850s.28 This perception was not confined to the Norwegian missionaries in Zululand; other mission stations in Natal were regarded as dens of witchcraft (Etherington 1978:96–9). An accusation of witchcraft was, at one level, an attempt to mark out deviation from the commonly accepted social order, or to give voice to disorder and discord (Berglund 1976:304–5). In addition some Zulus were concerned about the apparent immorality displayed by the missionaries. For example, the missionaries’ willingness to house young girls who were running away from prospective marriages – which I shall return to below – was an offense to Zulu ritual propriety, in which sexual relations were supposed to be carefully orchestrated (Porterfield 1997:73). So far I have touched on aspects of perceived risk related to the mission stations, including the affliction that might come from sustained contact with missionaries, the missionaries’ potential use of witchcraft, and the threat they posed to the moral order. But there was another related aspect of life on the mission stations that was perceived as an equally risky business by many of the Zulus, and which deserves separate discussion. This was the reading classes. 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.



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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 teaching 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,” esikoleni, 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 simply 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.

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Several Zulus seem to have been anxious about the reading of texts associated 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, catechumens were required to articulate sincere personal confessions of repentance 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 tradition, 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 commandments, 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).



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the performance of speech and oratory, and repetition of spoken words (Gunner 1979). The Norwegian missionaries, on the other hand, were particularly 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 emphasized 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 propositions 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 expressions. 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.

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way that was more common among the Zulus. Then they started with the alphabet, after which followed Zulu words, sentences and texts. Their basic subjects were reading, writing, arithmetic and religious instruction,39 though many of the students, it seems, did not get much further than learning to “read” by repeating sentences off by heart. In fact, most of the teaching, both in regular reading or school classes and in the classes that were set aside especially for catechumens who wished to be baptized, seems to have been based on repetition and learning by rote. During the first decades of the Norwegian mission, the missionary would commonly read from the Zulu text, sentence by sentence, and the students would repeat the sentences out loud.40 Lars Larsen reported that even when he wished to teach students to read silently on their own, the students preferred the more social and collective activity of repeating sentences out loud.41 As Patrick Harries (2007:191) notes of the Swiss mission stations, some people acquired mission literacy, while “many individuals read in ways that cannot be classed as either literate or illiterate.” The exception to this rote learning was biblical history, which the Norwegian missionary teachers “related orally, rather freely,” Paul Wettergreen reported.42 All the missions in Natal and Zululand placed great emphasis on using printed texts. They translated texts into Zulu, printed these, and tried to teach Zulus to read them. Hans Schreuder had already around 1850 written some Zulu reading pieces and a Zulu grammar (Schreuder 1848, 1850), and in addition to translating Luther’s Small Catechism into Zulu he also translated a number of hymns and the Altar Book of the Church of Norway, which included all the liturgies, such as the Order of Service for Sunday services (Myklebust 1949:48). Each mission society operating in Natal had their own printing press, and the Norwegians were no exception in this regard, though in 1865 they did agree to share the cost of printing the four canonical Gospels, translated into Zulu, with their Lutheran colleagues in the Berlin and Hermannsburg Mission Societies (Etherington 2002:426). Though the various mission societies in Natal were somewhat skeptical of one another, they seem to have felt that the need for Zulu printed texts was more important than their internal differences, and they were usually 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.



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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 languages 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 available 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, generally 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 characterizations 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 missionaries 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.

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that among the Zulus “evil is called good and good is called evil.”45 In other words, the Norwegian missionaries’ transcription and teaching of Zulu words and sentences in the classes on the mission stations in many ways served to intertwine the Zulu language with the missionaries’ derisive attitudes toward Zulu life. The mission classroom situation also, as Isabel Hofmeyr (1991) has observed, removed storytelling from its usual context in an oral society and cast it in a new mould. In oral African communities, stories were fluid and performative, told and learnt in the household, frequently around an evening fire and in a setting of intimate interaction. In the classroom the act of storytelling became tied to a more rigid, printed narrative, and was carried out in daylight, within the more formalized teacher–student relationship. As Hofmeyr notes, this had several effects, not all of which were destructive for local communities. On the whole, however, it is not difficult to see that missionary literacy embodied several moments of epistemic violence in relation to local custom and discourse. On the Norwegian mission stations the Zulu language was appropriated into a new framework and a new format – that of a written text in a classroom – and commonly taught and distributed by people – the missionaries – who had an especially inimical relation to much of its embedded context. The space that was created in the school room on the mission station, and which for at least some Zulus came to stand for the space of the mission station as a whole, was a highly ambivalent one. On the one hand, this provided some Zulus with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the written word, printed texts, acts of reading and writing, and the Bible – some important elements in the general culture of the various white groups who had settled in the area. It also to some extent provided them with the means to resist certain types of exploitation by settler groups, and at times gave them a small entrepreneurial advantage. For example, some mission station employees grasped the opportunity for economic entrepreneurship that the stations and the new skills offered, and a few even made a profit as traveling traders, using the pay they earned at the mission station as start-up capital, and keeping their base at the station (Jørgensen 1990:289;46 cf. Simensen 1986b:95–7, also

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.



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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 missionaries; 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 reconstruction 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 elements 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 underlined 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.

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poems (which, however, he made sure were also written down by one of his followers). He knew well how strongly this use of orality – blended ambiguously with the selective use of writing – opposed missionary literacy; as one of his izibongo says: The New Gospel which we saw setting the mountain on fire And preachers and evangelists denied it. They denied that we had just preached the gospel. They brandished their Testaments and Bibles in unison. They said “It is written thus.” (Gunner 1986:186, orig. emph., cited in Draper 2002:312)

This is a battle cry against the strong association that existed between the missionaries’ ability to read the Bible and their authority to interpret it, and to pronounce what was and was not true Christianity. The same protest was also at times heard among converts on the Norwegian mission stations. The Norwegian missionary Gundvall Gundersen once reproved the converts at Eshowe for being idle, but was told in response: “Are you the only one to be wise? Do all teachers teach like you? Do you not know that we are able to read the book (Bible) too?”48 The missionary emphasis on the great importance of learning to read, but on the condition that the correct interpretation of the texts was always the missionary’s interpretation, must also have occasioned a strong sense of ambivalence as far as the experience of literacy went for the early Zulu converts and other students on the stations. In due course the act of reading and the book of the Bible and its interpretation became appropriated in different ways by different Christian groups in Southern Africa.49 Former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu famously viewed the Bible as a key weapon in the fight against apartheid. In some of his remarks about this, however, he also goes back to the original ambivalence that was introduced on the mission stations: There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said “Let us pray,” and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible. It would, on the surface, appear as if we had struck a bad bargain, but […] [t]hose who may have wanted to exploit us and to subject us to injustice and oppression should really not have given us the Bible, because that placed dynamite under their nefarious schemes. (Tutu 1996:ix) 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.



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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 biblical studies. He outlines the historical legacy of missionary education, and the continuing unease that many of his students feel about the type of literacy 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 sufficient 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 cannot 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 station 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

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the early communities on the mission stations in Natal and Zululand was made up of individuals from various geographical backgrounds. People from Zululand might flee to mission stations in Natal; people from Natal might follow a missionary to a station inside Zululand. Some converts moved between mission stations of the different societies. Based on a sample of 748 persons resident on Congregationalist, Anglican, Methodist, and Lutheran stations in Natal and Zululand between 1835–1880, Norman Etherington (1976) has found that a large number were alien to the area in which the mission station was located. Of 197 individuals whose geographical origins were given, 46 percent came from beyond the borders of the local political unit. Of 177 for whom reasons for station residence were given, 33 percent were refugees, due to internal strife, accusations of witchcraft and evil-doing, or because of the wish to avoid a proposed marriage. A further 26 percent came to the stations to seek employment. And 14 percent had followed the missionary from a previous station – a strong indication, Etherington argues, of the degree to which they had “cut loose from their moorings” and become tied to the missionary and the mission station community instead (Etherington 1976:598). Finally, 12 percent gave explicit religious reasons for residing on the stations, linked for example to struggles of conscience, guilt, fear of death, or curiosity about the missionaries’ theology, and the remaining 15 percent came to the station because a parent or relative was already living there (Etherington 1976:595–9). Torstein Jørgensen’s findings confirm that these general trends seem in large part to be true for the Norwegian mission stations in Natal and Zululand. However, three important precisions may be drawn from his account. Firstly, refugees and patients stayed on the Norwegian stations for shorter periods of time, while employees often stayed longer, sometimes for several years (Jørgensen 1990:291). Station employees were almost always resident on the station during their period of employment. During the first couple of decades of the Norwegian mission, therefore, the largest group of Zulus consistently present on the mission stations were the resident station employees. Umphumulo had around 20–21 employees in 1858;50 in 1862, this number had risen to around 40, of whom one third were women.51 Some remained in service for a long time and took on important roles, such as Mbiyana Ngidi who worked as a wagon driver at Umphumulo for a decade. Secondly, those who converted were overwhelmingly 50 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1859:41. 51 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1862:121.



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recruited from the station employees, rather than from groups of refugees or patients (Jørgensen 1990:279–92). The most stable element of the resident 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 missionaries 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 mid1820s, 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 normal 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).

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to their homes away from the station, instead of setting up homes on the station itself.54 The issue of marriage and setting up a home played a particular role in the lives of young women who approached the stations. The prospect of marriage to a particular convert, or more often the wish to escape from an anticipated marriage at home, does seem to have been the cause for some young women to wish to move to the mission sta­ tions, including the Norwegian stations (Etherington 1976:596–7, Jørgensen 1990:353, Mahoney 1999:379–80). However, to this conventional historical fact should be added the observation that young unmarried women who wished to convert usually needed, in due course, to find somebody to marry. They would likely be ostracized by society, their families and even other Zulus on the station if they remained unconventionally single and did not find a marriage partner (Jørgensen 1990:276). A young woman’s wish to convert might therefore also have preceded her plan to marry someone on the station, rather than necessarily the other way around. Indeed, of the converts who got married on the Norwegian stations, the majority married other Christian converts (Jørgensen 1990:343, 353). This added another element of separation between the station community and surrounding society. Were women treated differently in the resident communities on the stations? On the one hand, the domestic, ostensibly subordinate role ascribed to women on the mission stations was in many ways in accordance with the role ascribed to women in Zulu homesteads. Although many significant differences existed, such as the greater economic centrality of women’s fertility in Zulu homesteads, and the greater stress on being the embodiment of everyday spiritual virtue on mission stations, there was also significant overlap in the area of women as homemakers and child bearers (Gaitskell 1990). As Amanda Porterfield (1997:73) puts it, both the missionaries and the Zulus “respected patriarchal authority and invested it with religious meaning, and both abhorred female promiscuity.” At the same time as strands of continuity are evident in gender relations, there were also moments of discontinuity. The overall patriarchal struc­ ture of missionary Christianity included counter-discourses of fundamental equality, including gender equality, which African women seem to have picked up on more quickly in the nineteenth century than men (Comaroffs 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.



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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.

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were hindered from coming back to the stations by their relatives, were discouraged by their chiefs, were accused of witchcraft, or were simply taken away from the stations by force.56 These young people were clearly not regarded as superfluous elements that could “reside where they wished” (Stavem 1915:165). Some of the young girls who fled to Norwegian mission stations in order to avoid a planned marriage, or to be with a young man whom their father did not approve of, could also at times evoke very strong reactions from their relatives. The missionaries report examples of young girls being threatened and beaten in order to make them leave the station. The male relatives of one female catechumen at Entumeni even came into the Norwegian missionaries Anna and Erik Ingebrigtsens’ kitchen in order to find the girl, beat her, take her home, and arrange her marriage that same evening.57 Other mission societies experienced similar techniques of resistance (Etherington 1976:594). What could account for this interest in preventing allegedly “marginal” members of society from converting to Christianity? As Justin Willis (1993) points out, those who might be considered marginal, or of lower status, were nevertheless important in many nineteenth-century African societies insofar as they made up groups of dependants who were linked to social patrons. This was especially so in nineteenth-century Bonde, which Willis writes about, where structures of clientage were woven into the social fabric, and where the mission station might be seen as a rival patron who could entice away dependants. Structures of loyalty and clientage in nineteenth-century Southeast Africa were closely tied to the system of homesteads, each with a homestead head. Homesteads were in turn loyal to local chiefs. Even a “marginal” member of a homestead, such as a young child, who showed too much interest in a mission station might pose a potential threat to the client base of the homestead head and the local chief. It is clear that the Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand, just like the British missionaries in Bonde, fuelled this dynamic by entering into the same social game of trying to build up a client base, a local congregation and community, on the station itself (Willis 1993:138). As Elizabeth Elbourne (2002:161) succinctly notes of missions in the Cape, on why they might pose a threat to other groups: “to accumulate people was to accumulate power and wealth, whether of the spiritual or material variety.” 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.



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“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 subordinate 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 prestige 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 converts 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 missionary 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.

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adjoining fields, cattle, human residents, and a male figure of authority – and perhaps with some perceived similar aims of accumulating and controlling people and other resources. And the Zulus had clear expectations of a homestead and a homestead head. As Jan Kielland wrote from Empangeni in 1869: If some of the station employees happen to offend somebody, one [i.e. the missionary] is immediately told: “This has been done by your man.” And it is emphatically claimed that the missionary should account for and take upon himself the responsibility for any big or small offense.59

The same expectation could be voiced by residents on the mission stations themselves,60 and by the political leaders in Zululand. An explicit example is given by Ommund Oftebro, when a father, mother and daughter sought refuge on the mission station at Empangeni. They had fled from their homestead after the homestead head had been put to death following a “smelling out” process, and they feared that they would meet the same end. Ommund, who like all the Norwegians was anxious not to harbor refugees illegally, reported the situation to Prince Cetshwayo. Cetshwayo’s response, Ommund reported, was that the prince gave the missionary permission to “‘tola’ him, – i.e. to keep the man with wife and daughter as my people.”61 The Zulu term thola literally means “to get” or “to obtain” – in other words, Ommund was given the right to “obtain” the people and to act as their new homestead head. The space of the station, and how to govern it, was thus also subject to a process of Africanization. Again, the Norwegians were not alone in this. For example, Elbourne (2003:450) notes that LMS’ Robert Moffat did not just try to recreate a rural Christian idyll (harking back to Britain) at his station Kuruman among the Tswana, but also in many ways came to act like a local African leader, in interaction with the political conditions around him. However, this was not a straightforward process. The Norwegian missionaries, for example, both denied and took on this role of African authority, in different ways. On the one hand, they did not always wish to take on the role of homestead head, umnumzane, as it was conceptualized by the Zulus. Jan Kielland thought of it as follows: For this right – the right of an umnumzana – is a very extensive one. And if the missionary in all parts tried to make use of it, or seeks for it to be respected, 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.



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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 punishment 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 extensive 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 clarified judicial arrangements on the stations, together with the mixed background 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 missionaries themselves (Simensen 1986b:93, Jørgensen 1990:367–8). On the other hand, if they did not always completely fulfill the requirements 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 households 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 thrashing” 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 frustrated 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 characterize 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).

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the station, they issued moral guidance, and they claimed the right to allow people to stay on the station or to send them away. Their position could be described with the words that Sheila Meintjes uses to describe the British missionary James Allison while he was still head of Edendale in the 1850s: “he used his special position to act in many ways like a lord with rights of demesne, although this was masked by his role as pastor, father, teacher and counselor” (Meintjes 1990:129). No doubt, as Jørgensen (1990:343) observes, the Norwegian male missionaries associated their role loosely with the pietistic image of the patriarchal “father of the family” or “head of the household” (pater familias), which was prevalent in nineteenth-century Norwegian Protestant circles. It was sometimes given a theological justification: the authority of the male head over the household was taken to mirror the authority of Christ over the Christian congregation. The image of “father” was readily adopted by other missionaries as well – for example, both Robert Moffat and John Colenso presented themselves as “father” in relation to potential converts (Worger 2001:423–4). On the mission stations, the male missionary was able to act as the head of a very large “household” or “homestead,” and the father role became a fairly dominant one. The Mission Stations as Land of the Whites The mission stations, with their resident communities, raised the complicated issue of political loyalty. Norwegian missionaries in Zululand repeatedly 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 assumption: 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 ideally to create station spaces that would model an alternative form of pietistic Christian society, with Christian worship and rituals, as well as marriages that conformed to their ideas of proper Christian gender relations – i.e. no



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polygamous relations or lobola (bridewealth exchange). At times, especially in the 1850s and 60s, it seems that the missionaries thought of these issues as religious questions, and assumed that they could be altered without 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 marriage, bridewealth, and ancestral shades – integral parts of the king’s religious 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 transforming 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.

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baptism, except in individually negotiated cases, was not followed up consistently in practice, thus leading to a rather unclear policy (Jørgensen 1990:325–7). On the whole, however, once a person had converted and had become an ikholwa residing on a mission station, she or he had in many ways ceased to be a subject of the Zulu king (cf. Jørgensen 1990:340). The Zulu royal court regarded most Zulus who converted as having left the Zulu political entity and having become a subject of the missionaries instead; he or she usually forfeited the political duties (such as military service for the men) and privileges of a Zulu subject. As discussed in chapter 4, apparently a commonly used term for conversion among the Zulus in the nineteenth century was wela, i.e. to “cross over”; wela was used to refer to two acts that seemed analogous to the Zulu ruling house, namely the act of fleeing from the Zulu king by crossing the Thukela river and entering the Colony of Natal, and the act of being baptized as a Christian and moving to a mission station. In this way the mission stations within Zululand were in reality turned into extraterritorial land; they were effectively put in political quarantine (Simensen 1988:174). (This approach was particularly noticeable in Zululand and was quite different from the one chosen, for example, by the Ngwato rulers among the northern Tswana, who were able to harness Christianity in order to expand the reach of their own political authority; Landau 1995.) It seems, based on Hans Schreuder’s reports, that by the mid-1860s it had become common enough among people in Zululand “to look upon and call mission stations isilungu,” which, he explained, referred to “land of the whites, often Port Natal is given this name.” Hans vigorously refuted this practice, since, as he put it, “we did not come to found land of the whites or states of the whites in the Zulu country.” He especially objected to the term isilungu because “we know well enough that it is the nature of isilungus [whites] to expand and – in this case – to expand at the expense of the Zulu country and in this way to devour it.”65 This was not the missionary cause, he argued; the missionaries, rather, wished “to seek the best for this people.”66 But despite Hans Schreuder’s arguments, the perception of the ­mission stations as “land of the whites” – quarantined islands ruled by white men – persisted, and was also voiced by King Mpande. In 1867 he told the Norwegian missionary Paul Wettergreen, who had been sent to discuss 65 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:232. 66 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1867:232–3.



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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 exclusion of the rival spaces of the mission stations from Zulu territory. The initial 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 manageable 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 unintended 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 communication 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 repeatedly to protest this extraterritoriality and to underline, rather unconvincingly, 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.

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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 missionaries 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 cordoning off the stations, both sides were also miring themselves down in unintended 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, contradiction, 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 context 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



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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 religious 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 authority. 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).

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plots of land that the missionaries were given – though “ironic” apparently only in retrospect, as one and a half centuries later it seems that the way the missionaries set up their mission ran partially counter to their intentions. At the time, however, they themselves did not fully perceive this to be the case or comment on it (cf. Pels 1990). Neither do they seem to have planned for the mission stations to serve as a springboard for future generations who would articulate opposition to the way racial hierarchies were established in early twentieth-century South Africa. In the study of missions and their effects, “paradoxes and ironies abound” (Etherington 1982:196).

CHAPTER SIX

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 different 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 examine 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 nineteenthcentury 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.

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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 project. Hans Schreuder had long wished to have a Norwegian station there. It was a strategic place, situated not far from King Mpande’s royal homestead 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 addition, 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 second 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.



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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 completed 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 government 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 sometimes 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 hesitate 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.

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rings true for him too. Hans did not stop to question what King Mpande was testing out or hoping to achieve as he apparently played Hans Schreuder off against Robert Robertson, or why Prince Cetshwayo so easily turned his “no” into a “yes.” Instead, Hans took it as a personal and spiritual victory, and the triumph colored the mission station space as a trophy. The stations were spaces to be treasured, and (as we will see in the following chapter) the missionaries were keen to hold tightly on to these plots of land that they had secured. 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’ letters 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 difference, 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.



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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 heathen 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.

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people who bear murderous desire in their hearts.”17 Whether he is hinting here that he feels that he and Martha have indeed been harmed in nonphysical ways – perhaps through a sense of spiritual depletion – he does not spell out. Again, the theme of being devoured is touched on – this time in relation to the threat, as Lars put it, that evil might devour him and Martha. He also used a metaphor that was often used by nineteenthcentury missionaries, namely that of light and darkness, referring to the Zulus around him as being “ensconced in an infinitely pitch dark night.” At other times during these years he recorded remarks that revealed his own loneliness at the Inhlazatshe station, and his sense of living in a situation of spiritual “dryness.” In one letter, he wrote: “we are working in a spiritually dry land where there is no water of life.”18 In another letter, he mentioned that the Bible was indispensable as a source of strength, and then commented: I do not think that anyone feels this as strongly as a missionary who is placed in an area like this. Those who at home have such rich opportunity to live in spiritual abundance, would probably have difficulties in feeling and understanding this […] Oh if only they really knew, what they have, those who enjoy all these spiritual goods!19

And after he heard of criticism leveled at the Norwegian Missionary Society in Norway, he responded by describing his own sense of feeling lost in the face of critics: It therefore affects one, when one has heard or read such oppos. [opposers], as it befell the skeptic on his death bed; since when he was told by his skeptical brothers to “hold fast unto the end,” he answered “I do not have anything that I can hold on to.” – 20

Lars Larsen and his Norwegian missionary colleagues were not alone in describing these more or less frequent bouts of strong feelings of foreignness, isolation, loneliness, and threat in relation to their position on mission stations. Nineteenth-century British missionaries in Central Africa too from time to time felt that the surrounding “dark” and “heathen” culture was infectious, and that their stations represented besieged islands in the midst of this ­culture (Cairns 1965:68). H.A.C. Cairns detects a fear among them of being devoured, swallowed up, submerged, and of losing their own 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.



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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 examples of friendship and a sense of companionship between certain missionaries 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).

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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 missionaries 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 multifaceted 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 message 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.



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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 pronounced 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 MissionsTidende 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 MissionsTidende that are available online through the Harvard Library website.

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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 enveloped 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



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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 theologies of mission. They are also very practical. The emotional importance of the metaphorical 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 existing 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 MissionsTidende, 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 frisson of horror, gelled with the seemingly perennial taste for the combination of the shocking and the moral, providing them [readers of mission magazines] 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 discuss 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 missionaries may have resorted to black-and-white images because of a need

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to guard their European identity and to remind themselves about the basis of their mission in the face of ambiguity (Erlank 2001:30). Skeie also mentions this possibility in relation to the nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries in Madagascar: The implicit images, which emerge from the descriptions of the missionary’s daily life[,] of Malagasy people, of the missionary and of the relationship between the missionary and Malagasy people, contradict the corresponding images emerging from the light and darkness image […] In this negotiation process, the prominent light and darkness image appears to take on other implications for some: Is this image the last straw of faith which some missionaries cling to, the only thing which legitimises their struggles, their illnesses and pains, their isolation? Is the image of light and darkness some missionaries’ mark of protection from losing their grip and “going native” […]? Is the prominence of light and darkness images in some missionaries’ writing in fact an indication of how profoundly they were influenced through the encounter with the Malagasy? (Skeie 2001:176, 180)

As this quotation shows, the use of binary imagery in missionary letters can sometimes tell us something about the letter writers. Griffiths (2005:156) notes that stereotypical missionary discourses, such as that of light and darkness, do not just tell us about the “heathen” subjects that were being constructed; they can also tell us how difficult the work of construction was, and what might have been elided or hidden away. The very forms that were created and imposed on the subjects of the missionary letters may also point us in the direction of the writer, one of the texts’ “occluded subjects” (Griffiths 2005:156). Indeed, in reading through the letters of the Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand, it is striking how often they let their descriptions of the Zulus tell the Board something about their own state of mind and state of heart, whether implicitly or explicitly – as when Lars Larsen, for example, drew a link between his spiritually “dry” surroundings and his own sense of interior spiritual “dryness.” For most of them the correspondence with the Board was personal and important in this regard; it provided them with a lifeline to the world of European Evangelical Protestantism, a world in which the meaning and purpose of mission was perhaps clearer than on the mission stations. 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



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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 family 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 society 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 weaknesses 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 overcome 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.

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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 commodities, cattle for woman, and mostly (though not always) missed the meanings 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.



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thoroughgoing changes that he imagined would be needed in order to extend the miniature Christian society on the stations outward to encompass 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 (amadlozi), 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 structures 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 difference 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 singleminded 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.

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between the missionaries and their mission boards back in Europe and North America: “Metropolitan mission boards were not equipped to understand or deal with this kind of problem. Their frequent orders that missionaries should leave the comfort of their stations and go out ‘aggressively’ preaching the word were beside the point” (Etherington 1982:195). Interestingly, while the Board of the Norwegian Missionary Society wished for their missionaries to carry out itinerant preaching if possible, they did also grow supportive of the settlements of resident Christian communities that evolved on the stations. Indeed, in 1866 Christian Dons, then Secretary of the Society, explained to the readers of Norsk Missions-Tidende that the populated mission stations could act as magnets: “In this way our lonely mission stations expand to become Christian colonies, which in the desert of heathen life stand out as friendly beckoning oases.”30 The Norwegian missionaries, as well as the NMS Board, seem to have been working with an idea of “spatial Christianization” here. They were mentally and literally measuring off and buttressing Christian areas, or Christian land, in the midst of non-Christian indigenous space. As discussed above, the stations were sometimes imagined as points of light in the midst of areas of darkness. The alternative society that was created on the stations was a more tangible manifestation of this symbolism. The station was a type of reconstructed Zulu society, under white missionary rule, delineated by a “moral boundary” (Predelli 2003a:109). But spatial Christianization is always tenuous; the missionaries constantly found themselves engaging across the boundary with non-Christian elements and people, while at the same time trying to separate themselves from such elements (cf. Holler 2007). The boundaries were hard to pin down, as was the type of Christianized space that emerged. 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.”



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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 missionaries had to live in a wagon or a Zulu hut before they had built a square residential 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).

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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.)



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Figure 5. Woodcut of Eshowe mission station, c. 1886. (Printed in Norsk MissionsTidende 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 contain 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 residents.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 station 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.

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the huts were more closely integrated with the station lay-out in practice, but were intentionally erased from the visual representations of the stations. I lean toward the latter interpretation, mainly because it is clear that other elements were erased from these images too. The images tend to exclude both farm animals and fields. For example, none of the chickens, sheep, cattle or horses that we know were present at Umphumulo (as described in chapter 2) are included in Hans Chris­ tian  Leisegang’s watercolor of the station (Fig. 3). The later woodcut of Umphumulo (cover image) includes a team of oxen pulling a wagon, but no other farm animals are visible. This woodcut has sketched in either a field or cattle enclosure in the foreground, which blends in with the surrounding dark, flat area so as not to detract from the more lightly colored residential houses and church behind it. The woodcut of Inhlazatshe (Fig. 4) also seems to include a square field immediately to the left of the main cluster of houses, though it is difficult to detect and is not drawn to the attention of the viewer. The woodcut of Eshowe (Fig. 5) focuses on the neatly laid out, symmetrical gardens and garden paths in front of the main residential house. These gardens may have included vegetables and herbs, but the viewer is mainly struck by their decorative and tidy visual impact, rather than their potential function as farmland. The decorative effect is underlined by the depiction of people strolling leisurely along the curved garden paths. The general erasure of round huts, farm fields, and farm animals from these visual representations of the nineteenth-century mission stations points to the ideal station image that the mission wished to project to its audience in Norway. The representations capture the idea of the stations as miniature utopias, ideal areas of Christianized space. The artists behind the woodcuts and watercolor sensed, perhaps, that if traditional round huts were visible in the station space, they would have blurred the moral boundary between the Christianized station and its heathen surroundings, which may have confused the viewer. In addition, as discussed in chapter 3, the missionaries themselves continuously tried to emphasize that their chief occupation was the “real mission work,” and they struggled with the fact that much of their time was spent on “exterior work” such as building and farming. The artists may have sensed this too, choosing to downplay the stations’ functions as farms, insofar as they did not wish to draw attention to how much time the missionaries spent on farm work. This is also brought out in the fact that, in the woodcut of Umphumulo, c. 1880 (cover image), the church has been depicted as larger than it is in reality, and the image



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has been framed so that this larger-than-life church is central to the picture’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 development 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 clustered 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 composition to the woodcuts of the Norwegian stations, though the German images place somewhat less emphasis on the sky and include more detailed foregrounds. However, the third image (c. 1886) is composed quite dif­ferently, showing the German missionary walking along a road that cuts ­diagonally

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across the picture, under tall trees that reach beyond the top of the frame, with the mission station buildings in the background (Kirkaldy 2005: Illustration 7). It was possible, then, to represent mission stations in different ways at the time, and it does not seem like the empty sky and foreground of the Norwegian images were inevitable. Therefore, it is interesting to note that in the pictures of Norwegian mission stations the upper left-hand quadrant, which is usually the “strongest” part of an image (Kirkaldy 2005:146), is consistently given over to the sky. In this way the artists may – either intentionally or unintentionally – have signaled the importance they accorded to the heaven that spanned over the stations. In Norwegian, the same word is used to refer to “sky” and “heaven,” namely himmel, and the Norwegian Lutherans associated the heavens above with God, prayer (frequently addressing “Our Father, who art in heaven”), salvation (which would lead to heaven), and eternity. In this sense, the sky that was drawn above the stations may have been interpreted by the readers of Norsk Missions-Tidende as a “full” emptiness, marking God’s presence over the stations and pointing toward the hope of what the stations would bring about, namely eternal salvation. The foreground in the bottom part of the Norwegian pictures is largely lacking in detail. The foregrounds are made up of grass (Fig. 4) or indeterminate, darkly shaded flat land (Fig. 5 and cover image). The flat foreground in the woodcut of Umphumulo (cover image) contains a nondescript road and a square enclosure or field. The strip of foreground that has been included in the watercolor of Umphumulo has simply been left vacant, painted with a very light wash of color (Fig. 3). Again, the image of Entumeni (Fig. 2) presents a partial exception, since the bushes in the foreground might either be interpreted by the viewer as the “empty” space of a thicket, or as the “cultivated” space of a hedge. For Norwegian mission supporters, the vacant foregrounds in most of the pictures might perhaps have evoked an idea of the apparent emptiness around the stations, into which the ­stations could expand, thus representing the surrounding country as land that was waiting to be Christianized or emptiness waiting to be filled. 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



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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 virtually 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 missionary 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, missionaries, 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 somewhere 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 evangelization and the need for education or other ‘civilizing’ functions, they struggled 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

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toward closer pragmatic collaboration with colonial administrations, which entailed a stronger “civilizing” role. Where did the Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand fall on this spectrum? On the whole it seems that they had an ambivalent atti­ tude toward European civilization, insofar as they grappled with the question of which parts of European civilization to characterize as “progress” (cf. Simensen 1988:169, Skeie 2001:170). Their larger understanding of “progress” was one tied to the progress of the Christian faith in any given society; were it not for Christianity, they held that humankind would evolve not from worse to better, but from better to worse (Jørgensen 1990:151). On the one hand, they associated this Christian faith with many European ways of life, including, as we have seen, particular types of housing, clothing, education, literacy, family structure, gender roles, and economy. On the other hand, they were anxious about the apparent decline of the Christian faith in Europe and what they thought of as “un-Christian” conduct by various European traders, settlers and colonial officials in Southern Africa. For example, at Umphumulo Lars Larsen expressed his discontent at the local British Magistrate Williams and his lack of Christian conduct when Williams, after visiting the station on official business, chose to leave on a Sunday morning – rather than stay to attend the Sunday service.33 And at Inhlazatshe, Lars Larsen was suddenly and unusually complimentary about Zulu culture in general when comparing it to the type of practices that he perceived to be introduced by the European traders in northwestern Zululand: 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 suspicion. 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 neighborhood 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.



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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 missionaries regarded themselves – rather than the European colonial officials, settlers 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.

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and the Norwegians.39 This was accentuated by the fact that at the same time Robert Robertson had apparently obtained permission from Prince Cetshwayo to start a school at his station at Kwamagwaza in Zululand by supplying the prince with firearms, Ommund Oftebro reported.40 The Norwegian missionaries also refused to supply the Zulus with liquor.41 However, the Norwegian missionaries did regularly bring gifts to the Zulu royal house, including blankets, sheets, clothes, tools and matches, and at least on one occasion the Norwegian missionary Jan Kielland did not draw back from using these “civilized” artifacts as “proofs” of Christianity, as he told Prince Cetshwayo: You often admire what the white people produce and their skill and knowledge, 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 representations of European society, then, they wished to convey an Evangelical version 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 alcohol, 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.



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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 appropriation of land by white settlers in the Cape: These white masters settled, cultivated uncultivated ground, cleared the forests, 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 “civilizatory 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).

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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 passivity 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 leaders, 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 baptism of the first Zulu convert, he reported: I went to see the prince on a matter proving to become one of radical importance 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.



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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 colonizing 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 different 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.

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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 administration. The committee was made up of both missionaries and colonial officials, 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 volunteer 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 missionary paid by NMS, and overseer of the Umphumulo mission station and mission 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 modernism. 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



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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 settlers 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 sentence 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 understanding of this issue and the experiences detailed in this chapter to view the mission stations as heterotopias. The concept “heterotopia” was briefly discussed 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 mentions 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

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entrenched points of light by the missionaries, spaces that were perceived by some to be “land of the whites,” and spaces that were perceived by others to be miniature models of Christian civilization rather than European colonization, and so on. The concept of heterotopia leads to the question of utopic visions. Foucault (1986:24) suggests that heterotopias are “something like countersites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” The missionaries did indeed see the stations as “counter-sites”: as spaces of light in the midst of darkness, as models of alternative Christianized societies in the midst of Zulu society, and as showcase settlements of Christian civilization in the midst of colonial agents and settlers who did not always conform to the missionaries’ ideas of progress. In these ways, the stations amounted to effectively enacted utopias. But, as we have seen, the missionaries were also in many cases forced to compromise and to live with ambiguous enactments, and so perhaps a more precise understanding of the mission stations as heterotopias is given by Sally Munt (2002:§16), who sees heterotopic spaces as “kinds of mirrors to utopias […] in which the utopic glance returns.” The mission stations came to function as mirrors – cracked and blackened mirrors, I should add – that simultaneously kept the reflection of the utopic vision always in the mind’s eye of the missionaries, yet also returned that utopic gaze to itself in the knowledge that the actual enactment of the utopia was limited in so many ways. Yet, as hard as life on the stations might have been experienced, and as ambiguous and tricky as it might have been for the missionaries to position the stations within the colonial context as well as the political and social life of the Zulu kingdom, the stations, through all of this, provided the missionaries with a space that enabled them – however imperfectly – to live in the light of their ideals, and to project their Christian identity passionately into the world. The hold that the missionaries kept on these spaces was mirrored by the great importance that the spaces had gained for them – the hold that the spaces had on them. This was brought out more starkly during the 1870s and 80s, as the missionaries tried their best to protect the stations during the political unrest before, during and after the Anglo-Zulu War.

PART THREE

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER SEVEN

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 ambitions, 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 formally 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

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control, and Boer settlers to the west, who were making demands on parts of Zululand (Hernæs 1986:144–8). It was entirely possible for war to break out at any time between the Zulus and the encroaching Boer farmers (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga 2010:378). Cetshwayo was also concerned to consolidate and centralize some of the power that had become more devolved under the reign of his father Mpande (Ballard 1986:74). The 1870s were a politically restless time in Zululand. Lars Larsen reported from the mission station Inhlazatshe that there was a temporary “kind of peace” in 1876, when as many as 20 to 30 people worked on the station, but then the political instability in Zululand erupted again – more violently and across a larger area than before.1 Cetshwayo sent his troops out across Zululand, apparently, according to what Lars heard, to enforce that his people practiced polygyny instead of white people’s monogamy.2 Many young Zulus fled. Zulus and missionaries alike were unsure about what was going on and worried about what might happen. In 1877, a rumor spread like wildfire that a few Zulu Christians had been murdered in the southern parts of Zululand. An atmosphere close to panic set in. Most people on the Inhlazatshe station left as quickly as they could.3 Three Christian men stayed behind with the Larsens. “It surprises me,” Lars wrote, “that they dare to be here.”4 In 1877 Ommund Oftebro reported that he had heard a rumor from Fred B. Fynney, Theophilus Shepstone’s agent, that King Cetshwayo had declared that he would exterminate all mission activity in his country but would allow the missionaries themselves to stay. Fred Fynney advised the missionaries to leave Zululand.5 The Norwegians decided to hold their annual conference just outside the Zulu border, and to send Ommund Oftebro and Ole Stavem to talk to Theophilus Shepstone. They did not meet him, but instead spoke with his brother (John Shepstone) and Sir Henry Bulwer, Lieutenant Governor of Natal, who told them he thought they ought to remain on their stations for the time being.6 The confer­ ence,  after hearing the latest news from Natal, decided not to evacuate yet,7 though they were aware that all German missionaries had evacuated  Zululand in 1877, and that the British missionaries were apparently 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.



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“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 reportedly 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 military 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 possibility 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 independent 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.

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advice. Theophilus Shepstone had an agenda of his own, which included the wish to put pressure on the Zulu royal house in order to find ways of dismantling the potential military threat that the Zulu army posed, and to be able to exert British influence over a wider area in order to secure a Southern African confederation. In choosing to organize a group evacuation, the Norwegian missionaries bolstered the perception in Natal and in London that conditions inside Zululand were intolerable. Their evacuation also allowed plans for a British military invasion to be drawn up that did not have to take the safety of European missionaries inside Zululand into account (Hernæs 1986:156–7). In May 1878, Ommund Oftebro reported that all Norwegian, British and German missionaries had left Zululand, apart from a single British station close to the Natal border.12 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, missionaries, 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.



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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 confidential. 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 colonial habit of blaming all wars on African aggression and later historians’ tendency 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.

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chapter seven 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 likelihood 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 disband 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 superior power of the English […] God grant that it may be carried out well, without 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 cruelty 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.



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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, provide 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 discrepancies 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.

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the time.25 At one of the Norwegian missionaries’ conferences a few years earlier, when the question was raised as to whether it would be advisable for the Norwegian mission in Zululand to seek help from the British colonial administration in Natal, the missionaries were divided, with a slight majority expressing the opinion that this would be questionable.26 It seems that this questioning attitude lingered for some of the missionaries in the lead-up to the Anglo-Zulu War. Ole Stavem later wrote that there were “constant” questions and “nagging” doubts among “at least some of us” during the evacuation period in 1878–79 as to whether they had chosen the right approach; he also recalled discussing with his colleagues whether “maybe old Larsen had been right” in mistrusting the evacuation advice given by Theophilus Shepstone (Stavem 1915:223). A little while after the Anglo-Zulu War, from 1882–1890, Ole Stavem and Ommund Oftebro both worked at the Eshowe mission station. During this time, Ole Stavem succeeded Ommund Oftebro as superintendent for the missionaries, in 1888. Ole later gave a brief assessment of Ommund’s suitability for the role of superintendent. It is worth bearing in mind that the appointment of Ole as superintendent to replace Ommund had been highly controversial in the mission, and there was friction between Ole and Ommund for other reasons too (see Tjelle 2011:67–71, 74, 83). Ole’s description of Ommund should be read in this light. Nevertheless, it may provide a glimpse into the manner in which Ommund made strategic political decisions. Ommund was a good preacher, Ole Stavem noted, and he was friendly and well liked. The other missionaries were always happy to see him when he came to visit them, and he himself was a strong believer in hospitality and enjoyed the many guests that stopped by his station at Eshowe (Stavem 1915:139–40). But, Ole Stavem reflected around 35 years later: He admitted himself that this position [as superintendent] was too difficult for him […] He was not independent enough. It therefore became possible for irresponsible advisors to influence him. Already during the initial critical times leading up to the Zulu War it became clear that all too soon he went along with plans that had been drawn up by others. (Stavem 1915:140)

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.



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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 personal 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 conclusion 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 subjugation 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 officials 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 contravention 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 mission organizations in Southern Africa toward segregationist policies.

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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 territory 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 stations 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



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government, which we have endured so much under; no, but I see God’s finger 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 proimperial 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 missionaries 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.

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have grasped at the possibility that the same state of despair could be induced in the Zulu people as a whole through exterior, political means. At least some of the missionaries seem to have entertained the idea for some time before the Anglo-Zulu War, as the Norwegian missionary Hans Christan Leisegang wrote already in 1871: To human eyes it looks as if this [Zulu] people can only be bent through material and political humiliations in such a way that it will be taught to seek something higher. Their political and spiritual existence forms a unity that it seems will not break without serious blows […] Tribes who live under the harder yoke of the Dutch seem to provide a more prepared soil for the seed of the Word of God.32

One methodological point worth noting here is that the humiliation thesis was a “front stage” narrative in the Norwegian mission. Tomas Sundnes Drønen (2009:19–20) and Marianne Gullestad (2007:73), in their studies of NMS’ work in Cameroon, suggest that we ought to differentiate between “front stage” and “back stage” narratives in the historical material (loosely drawing on Goffman 1959): “front stage” stories, discourses and explanations are intended for public consumption, while “back stage” information and discussions are not. In the mission, “front stage” narratives had various functions, including confirming the mission’s worldview (as discussed in the methodological note in chapter 3), fundraising, maintaining morale among mission supporters, and presenting challenges that would inspire further action. If any of the missionaries expressed doubts, confusion or heavy criticism of the mission, it was important for the mission organization to make sure that such observations remained largely “back stage.” Therefore, the public mission accounts printed in NMS’ magazine Norsk Missions-Tidende tell a particular kind of story: a “front stage” story. In the history of the nineteenth-century Norwegian mission to Southern Africa there is some tension between “front stage” and “back stage” information, for example during and after the Anglo-Zulu War. In 1881, after the war, the annual report of NMS – probably penned by the new Secretary of NMS, Ole Gjerløw – stated: [The Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand] all agree, that the war and the defeat have had the effect that the Zulu people’s pride has been broken, and that they acknowledge their inferiority [Underlegenhed] to the white man. It is self-evident that this will be of great importance for the entrance of

32 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1872:133.



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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 magazine, 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 various 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 significant 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 courage 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 heathens 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.

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chapter seven 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 “equivocal prayer” that he attached were critical enough to be left out of the mission 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 agreements with many of the leading Zulu chiefs on the basis of a reduced ultimatum (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 chieftainships, 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 example, in their refusal to attend Sunday services.36 Observing these developments, 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 varying 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.



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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” narratives 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 critical 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 external 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 missionaries 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 people 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.

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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 similar 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 comparing 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 create better working conditions for the mission in exterior matters. It also created 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 missionaries who operated in colonial contexts naive? Did they not understand 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 ethnocentric, and therefore the most thoroughgoing, facet of colonial life” 40 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1890:347.



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(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 selfrepresentation (Huber 1988:201–4). She suggests that the missionary experience 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 contradictions on the colonial frontier. But it seems to me that the different and at times self-contradictory gestures 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 welcoming 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 supporting 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 information 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).

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examples not simply of naivety, though there is that as well, but of the “epistemic murk” that Ann Laura Stoler has written about. Ann Laura Stoler (1992), following Michael Taussig (1984), discusses the “epistemic murk” that seems to have pervaded the knowledge and actions of colonizing populations. Colonial agents and others sought to make sense of political situations, native populations, and their own role based on incomplete sorts of knowledge, including rumors and hearsay, observations and imagined outcomes, and conjectural interpretations of ambiguous native acts. The facts and fictions, suggestions and warnings that they gathered together remained elusive and incoherent, but out of this cultural knowledge they needed to gauge risks quickly and fashion appro­priate responses. Elaborations of fear, as Stoler (1992:170) puts it, were “multilocal,” and “who is playing off whose violence and fears of it is unaddressed.” Local populations were both drawn to and repelled by colonizing populations, and the interlocked dynamics that ensued were marked by a range of local responses from manipulation and violence to subjugation and despair. Rumors about violent actions elsewhere, or about planned violence in the near future, resonated strongly with the fears of both settlers and local populations, and spread quickly. “Rumors voiced the possible” (Stoler 1992:180) – and they also wavered ambiguously between fueling and shoring up colonizing processes and subverting them (Stoler 1992:182). The rumors, imagined outcomes, conjectures, guesses and narratives that the Norwegian missionaries attended to and circulated within their colonial context amounted to this type of “epistemic murk.” They fashioned responses and policies out of these types of limited, exaggerated, and distorted cultural knowledges. Rumors were picked up quickly. The Norwegian missionaries assessed narratives offered by British colonial officers, such as Theophilus Shepstone and Bartle Frere. They gauged hearsay about King Cetshwayo’s latest decisions, for example the rumor that he was planning to exterminate all mission activity,44 in order to guess at its full veracity and possible implications. They listened to stories about Christians who had apparently been murdered without having recourse to check the facts.45 They tried to keep up with whether other missionaries were planning to evacuate or not.46 Stoler’s (1992:170) multilocal elaborations of fear were present. In an environment where careful weighing of clear evidence 44 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:338. 45 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:384. 46 Norsk Missions-Tidende 1877:339–40.



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was not an option, it seems the missionaries’ experience was neither primarily one of irony nor of naivety, but one of gauging, assessing, conjecturing 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 information. 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 mission 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 enthusiastic 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 “violence 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.

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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 sentence 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.



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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, however, in 1884, by the uSuthu faction under King Dinuzulu, who was supported 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 estimated 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 formally 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 entangled in questions of land and race in Southern Africa. When the Boers measured 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.

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northwestern Zululand, and declared the Nieuwe Republiek, Lars Larsen expressed his skepticism: “We know, of course, that wars are so frequently fought between blacks and whites because the latter take the land from the former,” he observed,55 and later he quoted John Coleridge Patteson, who had been a missionary and bishop in Melanesia: “I almost despair of doing anything for those blacks who live in the same land as whites.”56 However, a settlement was reached between the British and the Boers, and the Nieuwe Republiek was allowed to remain while the rest of Zululand was declared a British protectorate in 1887. As Boer ownership of farmland was formalized, the Inhlazatshe mission station was granted 3,000 acres of land – the same acreage as Boer farms in the area. The Norwegian Missionary Society accepted the offer and Lars Larsen found himself in charge of an expanded station area (Stavem 1915:300). Even Lars Larsen, who himself had pointed out that tensions could easily escalate between black and white people when the latter took the land from the former, was marked as a white man on the colonial and settler frontier, who resided on and ruled over a plot of land that had previously been owned by the Zulu king and now, by dint of British military invasion and Boer land seizure, belonged to the Norwegian Missionary Society. Although Lars may have tried to disassociate himself from the Anglo-Zulu War and the humiliation thesis’ support for colonial victory in his letters, he was not able, or willing, to extricate himself from the lived reality of colonial land appropriation. Of the other Norwegian stations in Zululand, two happened to lie in the district that had been granted to the white chief John Dunn: Ommund Oftebro’s station Eshowe and Hans Schreuder’s station Entumeni. Imme­ diately after the war, John Dunn initially prohibited the Norwegian missionaries from continuing their work at these stations, but after energetic negotiations he conceded permission for them to return. John Dunn then seems to have had a change of heart and even helped the Norwegian mission to secure land for two further stations in the area: Ekombe in 1880 (which was to replace the Norwegian station Emzinyati), and Ungoye in 1881 (Myklebust 1949:86).

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).



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Because of the civil war in Zululand, the Norwegian missionaries established 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 administration (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 superintendent 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 belonging to NMS), but might potentially pose a problem for the resident African congregations on the stations if their legal right to reside there was questioned (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 running 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).

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that knowledge of English could be valuable on the labor market, as well as pressure from the colonial authorities. In 1887–88, the NMS Secretary Ole Gjerløw undertook an inspection tour of the mission in Natal and Zululand. He was critical of this shift from Zulu to English instruction, since, as he put it in his report, “it was not necessary to know English to be saved” (Gjerløw 1888:22–3). There was a noticeable gap between the wishes of the NMS Board in Norway, which had still not apparently grasped the full extent of their missionaries’ interpolation in local politics, and the pragmatic, somewhat compromised strategy of the missionaries themselves, who wished to hold on to their stations, even as this meant administering annexed land on behalf of the colonial administration, and teaching its language. The missionaries’ attempts to hold on to their stations were set against the backdrop of increasingly racialized British colonial policies. The two decades from 1870 to 1890, straddling the Anglo-Zulu War, saw some important changes in relation to race relations and land politics in Natal. The number of whites registered by the Colony of Natal almost tripled, from 17,737 in 1870 to 46,788 in 1891, and the number of government employees grew from 99 to 695 in the same period (Keto 1976:615). The bureaucracy of the colonial state became more established. More white landowners and speculators acquired large land holdings. Diamonds had been discovered in the Southern African interior in 1868, and gold was discovered in 1882. The diamond and gold mines needed a cheap and accessible supply of labor, and new taxes and government policies designed to draw African men onto the labor market, including as migrant workers, contributed inexorably to the breakdown of traditional livelihood and homestead patterns. This was compounded by severe land shortages for Africans. In 1887, in the same year that Zululand was formally annexed as a British protectorate, all Africans were prohibited from purchasing land in certain areas of Zululand as they were laid out for public sale (Keto 1976:616). In many ways this was a logical step following the policies concerning land, employment and taxation that had already been put in place by Theophilus Shepstone, including the system of mission “reserves.” It was also a somber foreshadowing of what was to come in the twentieth century. The power relations in rural Zulu homesteads changed dramatically, as families became more dependent on wage labor and migrant remittances. This tumultuous process of domestic change, coupled with the British military victory in 1879 and ensuing civil war in the 1880s, did what the missionaries had not been able to do: it broke down Zulu social structures



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(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 revolution, 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.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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-workedout, 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 stations that preceded it. I suggest that the gendered and racialized hierarchies that the Norwegians had already set up and become familiar with through the 1850s, 60s and 70s, within the Christian spaces they had created 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 practices on their stations that underlined the authority of the white male missionaries, 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



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declaration of any specific change; just certain practices that were replicated more often and new narratives that started to circulate with more validity, leading up to the 1870s and 80s. Internal contradictions and ambiguous processes, as well as the seeds of these crystallizations, had been present – 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 missionaries 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 strategy” (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.

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Christians.2 In practice, however, even when six new male Norwegian missionaries 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 establishment 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 missionary 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 missionaries 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 continuous 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 priority 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.



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­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 purpose 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 provided 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 individual 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 miniature 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).

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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 furlough 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.



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to be able to grasp both the dualisms that the actors caught up in the colonial confrontation erected, as well as the ironies that consistently undermined 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 complexities 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 apartheid, 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 questions, 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;

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in  their materiality and potential decay, these things are no longer perceived to “work” as adequate representations of God. The Friday Apostolics turn instead to what they take to be “live and direct” signs such as speech, song, and healing. The nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand would have found this response shocking. Rather than discarding materiality, they used it actively in their attempts to represent God. On their arrival in Southern Africa, and faced with the question of how to communicate Christianity to the Zulus, they began by demarcating and shaping physical mission stations. As the missionaries created and inhabited these Christian spaces, the quandaries they came up against carry wider resonance. On the mission stations they were dealing with issues that have been commonly faced by Christians in various times and places: Which things should we use to represent an invisible God? Which words should we use to describe the divine? Should we read the Bible, and if so how, and who should interpret what is read? How should we relate to our own bodies in the light of Christ’s body? How should we think about things that make life comfortable? How should we seek to model Christ? How can we know our own Christian identity is still intact? Should we seek to attract new members to our community, and if so, how? How should we respond when new members do not seem to understand Christianity in the same way as more long-standing members? How should we think about such differences when they seem to coincide with other perceived differences, such as racial or “character” differences? Should we encourage people to have children? How should we think about women and men? What kind of people should be trusted with spiritual authority, and who has the power to make this decision? How should we relate to other religious understandings and practices in our surroundings? Should we feel threatened by our surroundings? How should we negotiate a relationship with larger and more powerful political structures, and what kind of compromises – if any – should we strike when it comes, for example, to securing land or having the freedom to carry out our activities? In short – how should we live Christianity in the world? Mission station Christianity addressed these issues. It did not resolve them. As the missionaries attempted to provide authoritative answers they simultaneously lost full control over the process. But I see the various contradictory consequences that they contributed to as being not solely a result of the Western forms of being that they brought with them, or of their limited historical perspective and agency. These causes are brought out clearly in the work of other scholars on nineteenth-century m ­ issionaries



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in Southern Africa, and both certainly played their important parts. But it seems to me that the contradictory historical consequences of the missionaries’ 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 missionary’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

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later withdrawn in 1912. The Union of South Africa was forged in 1910, comprising the Cape, Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Natal (including former Zululand), and was considered to be a self-governing dominion of the British Empire. With South Africa’s infamous Natives Land Act of 1913, Africans were forbidden to buy any land outside “tribal locations” (Keto 1976:625), and the act restricted African land ownership to less than eight percent of South Africa’s land (Marks 1987:15). As C. Tsheloane Keto (1976) outlines, the American missionaries shifted from working in tacit alliance with the Natal government regarding land policy to outright protest against these policies around the turn of the twentieth century. No similar shift, from support to protest, occurred at this time among the Norwegian missionaries. On the contrary, it seems as if the gradual and uncertain adoption of support for British imperialism that had occurred among the majority of the Norwegian missionaries in the 1870s and 80s was strengthened around the turn of, and into, the early twentieth century, as the Norwegian missionaries aligned themselves with the white settler government of Natal. In 1907, when a Natal Native Affairs Commission was set up to investigate the position of local Zulu chiefs, the Norwegian missionaries submitted testimonial evidence recommending that all Zulu chiefs should be deposed, that remaining Zulu political and social structures should be dismantled, and that they should be replaced by direct rule (rather than indirect rule) by whites.10 The only Norwegian missionary who vocally disagreed with this position was Nils Astrup of the Schreuder Mission (Hans Schreuder himself had passed away by this time, as had Lars Larsen). Even in the 1930s, as a Lutheran Zulu Church was gradually being established, heavily intertwined in missionary affairs and with uneven success (Mellemsether 2001a), the paternalistic and racially-charged view of the mission stations that had gradually taken hold among the Norwegian missionaries in the nineteenth century was still evident. Olav Guttorm Myklebust, who worked as an NMS missionary at Umphumulo from 1930– 39 and who ten years later wrote the official organizational history of NMS’ work in South Africa, described the Umphumulo “mission reserve” as an area where the government “gave the natives permission to live” provided they were “under the supervision and authority of the mission,” and commented that such areas “have played a significant part in the work for the 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).



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development of the Zulu people, both spiritually, economically and culturally” (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 apartheid 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 leadership, 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 Abraham, Rev. Andrew 37 African Christians see Converts; Kholwa African Christian Union 165n69 African evangelists 20, 90–94, 102–3, see also Pastors African-initiated churches 94n23, 149–50, 233, 235 African National Congress (ANC) 165n69 Agriculture, on mission stations 39–40, 139, 186 Alcohol 94, 94n23, 114, 179, 190–91, 192 Allison, Rev. James 34, 40, 160 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions see American Zulu Mission Amakholwa see Converts; Kholwa American Zulu Mission (AZM) 35–7, 90n11, 91–4, 103, 131–2, 149, 152, 210, 233–4 Ancestors see Shades Anderson, Rufus 189 Anglicans see Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Anglo-Zulu War, the 205–6, 213–14 changes in missionary Christianity and 201 civil war following 215, 221 epistemic murk and 202–3, 217–220 missionary criticism of 7, 207–8 missionary evacuations before 202–4 missionary support for 204–6, 209–10 stations destroyed during 219 Anthropology of Christianity 14–16, 58–9, 105–6, 109–10, 127–9, 231–2 of colonialism 7 (see also Colonial society) history and 22–25, 46–7, 125–6 of space 21 see also Ethnography; History Apartheid 3, 22, 150, 231, 235 Architecture ideas of civilization and 43–4 on mission stations 29–30, 39, 42–5, 73, 86, 90, 145, 153, 170, 185–7 on settler farms 43–4 of Zulu homesteads 38, 48, 73–4 Ardener, Shirley 91

Asad, Talal 106 Astrup, Rev. Nils 208n25, 215, 234 Atkins, Keletso 41, 55 Ballard, Charles 9n13, 202, 221 Baptism 88, 108 of African converts 85–6, 93, 153 names chosen for 115–17, 120 requirements for 111–12, 144 as seen by Zulu royals 161–2 Barth, Fredrik 9, 137 Bateson, Gregory 122n64 Bebbington, David W. 11 Beer see Alcohol Beidelman, Thomas O. 174, 216–17 Belief 105–7, 110, 114 Berge, Rev. Lars 88–9 Berglund, Axel-Ivar 48, 51–2, 115, 139–40, 141–2 Berlin Missionary Society 36, 38, 103, 114, 121–2, 145, 146, 153, 159n63, 187 Bethelsdorp mission station 153 Bevans, Stephen 177 Bhabha, Homi 118, 120–21, 124–5 Bible, the 40, 150–51, 232 baptismal names from 115–17 literacy and 42, 143–6 materiality of 59, 231 missionary authority and 150 missionary quotations from 171n15, 175, 175n, 191, 221 seen as powerful by missionaries 172, 192 seen as powerful by Zulus 143–4 translation of 146–7 (see also Translation) Bishopstowe mission station (Ekukanyeni) 18, 38, 61, 117 Blessing, Rev. Peder 62, 85 Bodies can harbor evil 139 double-sided character of 81–2 on mission stations 60, 71–5, 83–4, 118–19, 139, 145–6 moral domain and 60, 71–5, 232 punctured subjectivity and 140–41 race and 118–19 regulating habits of 71, 73, 75–7, 80–82, 145–6 space and 42–3, 76, 118–19, 145–6

252 index Boers see Settlers Bonde (Tanzania), mission in 113, 134, 156 Børhaug, Thomas 9n13, 51n38, 143n30, 154n54, 159n63, 205n16, 208n25, 215, 227, 228n5, 229n6 Borke (Government Agent) 191 Bourdieu, Pierre 42n, 46–7, 76 Bourgeois see Class Bowie, Fiona 91 Braudel, Fernand 24–5 Bridewealth see Lobola Brock, Peggy 91, 104 Brown, Peter 81 Bryant, A.T. 48n29 Buckser, Andrew 14–15 Bulwer, Sir Henry 202 Buxton, Thomas Fowell 193 Bynum, Caroline Walker 81 Cabrita, Joel 149, 150n49 Cairns, H.A.C. 159n63, 172–4 Calderwood, Rev. Henry 216 Callaway, Rev. Henry 50n32, 51, 55, 210 Calvinists 59 Cannell, Fenella 14 Cape Colony 33n6, 203, 234 Carnarvon, Earl of (Henry Herbert) 203 Catholics 38, 131 Cato (British consul) 205 Cetshwayo, Prince/King 96, 171 Anglo-Zulu War and 206–7, 214, 217, 221 grants use of land for stations 168–70, 229 instability of 1870s and 201–2 makes stations extraterritorial 161–4, 194–5 missionaries and 37, 109, 141, 143, 158, 160–64, 173, 181, 191–2 Charismatics 174 Chelmsford, 2nd Baron (Frederic Thesiger) 204–5 Christ 81, 232 missionary images of 12, 29–30, 49, 54, 82 see also God Christensen, Torben 189 Christianity anthropology of 14–16, 58–9, 105–6, 109–10, 127–9, 231–2 Evangelical (see Evangelicalism) expressed in bodies 71–5, 81–2, 83–4 expressed in buildings 43 expressed in clothes 112–15, 118, 120, 122

expressed in cultural forms 14–16, 39–43, 45–6, 127–9, 191–2, 231–2 expressed in furniture 63, 72, 80, 191 expressed in gardens 45 expressed in names 115–17, 118, 120 expressed in timetable 40–41 hybridity and 107, 110–11, 119–20, 125 materiality and morality in 58–9, 127–9, 231–2 pietistic (see Pietism) space and 4, 7, 182, 226, 231–3 Church see African-initiated churches; Sunday services Church Missionary Society (CMS) 68, 91, 189 Civilization, ideas about architecture and 43–4 colonial rule and 34–6 expressed in clothes 114 missionary attitudes toward 189–93 Class, of missionaries 17–19, 76–8, 124 Clothes 191–2 conversion and 111–15, 163 of missionaries 18, 77 on mission stations 45–6, 111–15, 118, 120, 121–2 settler ideas about 45–6 Coleman, Simon 105, 106, 174 Colenso, Bishop John William 93 Anglo-Zulu War and 7, 206–7, 209, 213–14, 227 converts and 117, 160 mission station of 18, 38, 61 Norwegians and 99, 168 on Zulu name for God 51–2 Colonialism anthropology of 7 architecture and 43–5 changes among colonized 76, 138, 165 changes among colonizers and missionaries 10, 19, 76, 78–9, 124, 138, 165 concept of 16–17 identification and 121, 149 interaction between colonized and colonizers 121, 138, 149, 151, 218 missionary criticism of 3–7, 162, 193, 195, 197, 213–14 missionary support for 46, 56–7, 177, 189–90, 194–7, 209–13, 215–16, 226–7, 234 missionary “double vision” and 100–103, 117–18, 121–5 normalization of 46, 177 see also Colonial rule; Colonial society

index Colonial rule Christianity and 34–6 epistemic murk and 218 operation of 32–6, 78–9, 102, 115, 147, 196 tax under 44 Colonial society 17–19, 43–4, 76–9, 82–3, 124, 218 Comaroff, Jean and John 41, 120, 149, 154, 160, 164 on Africanization of mission 137 on anthropology and history 22, 46–7, 125–6 on baptismal names 115–16 on bodily habits 75–6 on the colonial state 102, 147 on conversion 104–5 critique of 14, 128 on governmentality 79n on the long conversation 56–7, 127, 128 on mission and difference 230–31 on “missionary imperialism” 211 Conversion 104–25 academic study of 14–15, 104–6, 109–10, 120 African converts’ ideas about 106–11 African evangelists and 90–91, 104 African resistance to 131–2, 138–44, 155–7 as central to missionary identity 174 clothes as sign of 112–15, 120 as crossing (wela) 108–9, 110, 162 as identification 120–25 metaphors about 177 missionaries’ experiences of 12, 105 missionaries’ ideas about 11, 105, 211 names as markers of 115–17, 120 narratives of 88, 140 outer signs of 111–17, 128–9 as polysemic event 110 Converts 85–130, 131 adopt European ways 112–17 age of 153 cease to be Zulu subjects 161–4, 194–5 clothes worn by 112–13, 120, 121–2 continue using traditional religion 107, 110, 119 doctrinal disagreements among 107 economic activity of 148–9 increase in after 1880s 92n18, 104, 235 low number of 131–2, 171 mainly drawn from employees 86, 131, 152–3, 229 names chosen by 115–17, 120 opposition experienced by (potential) 139–41, 143–4, 155–7

253

send greetings to Norway 100–101 shape mission Christianity 105–30 Zulu royals and 161–4 see also Mission stations Cope, A.T. 149 Cowes, George Burr 233 Crais, Clifton 43–4 Culture Christianity expressed in 14–16 (see also under Christianity) colonial 17–19, 43–4, 76–9, 82–3, 124, 218 shock, of missionaries 170 space and 20–22 Dachs, Anthony 211 Dahle, Bertha 100n32 Dahle, Rev. Lars 96n25 Dahle, Rev. Markus 134, 141 Dannevig, Kristoffer 9n13 Darnton, Robert 22 Denis, Philippe 94n23 Des Chene, Mary 22, 68 Devil, the, missionary ideas about 50, 53, 68, 147, 171n15, 191 Dingane, King 32 Dinuzulu, King 219, 221 Diviners, Zulu 37, 140–41 consulted by converts 107, 110 gender of 48, 141 missionaries act as 36–7, 135, 136–8 missionaries and 51, 141–2 Domestic space see Space Dons, Rev. Christian 182, 193, 207 “Double vision,” of missionaries 100–103, 117–18, 121–5 Draper, Jonathan 149, 151 Drønen, Tomas Sundnes 90, 104, 212 Dube, James 165n69 Dube, John L. 165n69 Dunn, Chief John 222 Dutch Reformed Church 103 Eboussi-Boulaga, Fabien 147 Edendale mission station 40, 40n21, 153, 160 Education, on mission stations African attitudes toward 143–51, 223–4 African dilemma of identity and 149–51 colonial officials’ attitudes toward 147, 223–4 legacy of 151 on the Norwegian stations 29, 40–42, 95–6, 142–51, 223–4 settler attitudes toward 35–6, 147

254 index Ekombe mission station 13, 222 Ekukanyeni mission station (Bishopstowe) 18, 38, 61, 117 Ekutembeni mission station 13, 191 Elbourne, Elizabeth 4, 14, 24, 36, 43, 123, 153, 193, 209n28 on conversion 104, 110 on mission and colonial administration 189 on missionaries acting like chiefs 158 on mission as accumulating people 156 on patriarchal practices 157 Elphick, Richard 103, 209n28 Emotions see Sentiments Empangeni mission station 13, 18, 38, 109 authority of missionary at 158 converts and employees at 86, 100, 107, 138–9, 143, 144 daily life at 134, 136 land for 36, 223 Empire, British see Colonial rule Emushane outstation 132, 149 Emzinyati mission station 13, 222 Engelke, Matthew 58–9, 231 Entumeni mission station 13, 64, 153, 230 converts and employees at 92n17, 107, 156 land for 222 visual representation of 183–8 Eotimati mission station 13, 223, 230 Epistemic murk 19, 218–20 Erlank, Natasha 43, 76, 80, 124, 177, 178, 209n28 Eshowe mission station 13, 45n27, 113, 119, 153, 208 catechist school at 95 converts and employees at 95, 123–4, 140, 150 daily life at 133 land for 222 visual representation of 183–8 Esidumbini mission station 93, 132 Esinyamboti mission station 13, 223 Etherington, Norman 8n10, 91, 93–4, 131, 142, 166, 224–5, 235 on African resistance to mission 156 on Anglo-Zulu War 202, 203, 205, 206n18, 209–10, 214 on baptismal names 115–16 on mission shift to pro-imperialism 209–10 on clothes of converts 113 on conversion 104, 108, 109, 111–12 on missionaries and converts 103

on missionary focus on alternative society 181–2 on printed texts 146–7 on station communities 152, 154, 155, 164–5 on stations as basis for African political elite 165n, 231 Ethiopian movements see African-initiated churches Ethnicity, formation of 57–8, see also Zulu people Ethnography 22–24, see also Anthropology; History Evangelicalism 10–12, 33, 41, 48–9, 97, 105, 173, 192, see also Christianity; Evangelical revivals; Haugeanism; Moravianism; Pietism; Self-denial; Sincerity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa (ELCSA) 3 Evangelical revivals 10–12 Evangelists, African 20, 90–94, 102–3 Evil, missionary ideas about 147–8, 171–2, 221, see also Devil, the; Witchcraft Families, missionary 66, 76, 79–82, 83 Fanon, Frantz 42–3, 76, 118–19 Farming, on mission stations 39–40, 45, 139, 186 Ferguson, James 21, 231 Food of missionaries 39, 66, 73 of Zulus 38, 73 Foucault, Michel 79, 79n, 197–8 Frere, Sir Bartle 203, 204–6, 214 Friday Apostolics 59, 231 Furniture, on mission stations 62–3, 76–8, 80, 145, 191 Fuze, Magema M. 117, 150n49 Fynney, Fred B. 163, 202 Gaitskell, Deborah 154, 157 Gardens, on mission stations 45, 186, see also Farming Geertz, Clifford 23, 24 Gender division of labor on stations 39–40, 64–5, 88, 139, 154 female missionaries 13, 89, 91 missionary masculinity 98 missionary paternalism 98–100 missionary wives 66, 71, 74–5, 82–3, 89 patriarchal practices of mission and Zulus 154, 157–60

index of people drawn to stations 138–9, 142, 152–6 in South African history: spaces and 20 use of missionary names and 13n19 of Zulu diviners 48, 141 see also Sexuality Gifts, from missionaries to royals 18, 169, 191–2 Gjerløw, Rev. Ole 212–13, 214, 224 Glasgow Missionary Society 173n, 209n28 Glazier, Stephen D. 14–15 God academic study of 14–16 belief and 105–6, 110 missionary ideas about 49, 52–3, 137, 169, 173, 188 “problem of presence” of 30, 47, 58–9, 229, 231 Zulu ideas about missionaries’ 141 Zulu name for 50–53 see also Christ Goffman, Erving 212 Governmentality 79n Griffiths, Gareth 88, 91, 92, 177–8 Grimshaw, Patricia 89 Grout, Rev. Aldin 34, 35, 43, 131, 210 Grout, Charlotte 35, 210 Grout, Rev. Lewis 34, 131 Gullestad, Marianne 175n, 183, 212 Gundersen, Rev. Gundvall 150 Gunner, Elizabeth 145, 149–50 Guns 170, 191–2, 214 Gupta, Akhil 21, 231 Guy, Jeff 7, 18, 52, 61, 209, 214, 224–5 Gynnild, Vidar 9n13, 193n47 Hamilton, Carolyn 20 Harries, Patrick 33n7 on Anglo-Zulu War 202, 203, 205, 206n18, 209–10, 214 on missionary paternalism 99 on the normalization of colonialism 46 on reading 144, 146 Hastrup, Kirsten 24 Hauge, Rev. Andreas 4, 193 Haugeanism 11–12, 82, 98, 123, 211 Hauge, Hans Nilsen 12 Hefner, Robert W. 105 Henningsen, Anne Folke 121–2 Hermannsburg Missionary Society 37–8, 103, 114, 131, 146, 152, 153, 159n63, 202, 204, 210 Hermannsburg mission station 38, 131 Hernæs, Per 9n13, 202

255

on Anglo-Zulu War 203–4, 205n16, 206, 207, 208n25, 217 on “missionary imperialism” 211 Heterotopia 168, 197–8 Hicks Beach, Sir Michael 206n18 History anthropology and 22–25, 46–7, 125–6 describing historical processes 46–7, 125–6 reading historical mission sources 68–71, 87–92, 140, 175–8, 182–8, 210–16 see also Anthropology; Ethnography; Mission sources Hlonono, John 149 Hodgson, Janet 43 Hofmeyr, Isabel 145, 148 Holter, Knut 143 Home boards, missionary relationship with 67, 70–71, 72–3, 80, 89, 99, 182, 207, 209–10, 224 Homesteads see Zulu homesteads Horton, Robin 104 Houle, Robert 56n54 House(s) 21, 42n, see also Architecture Huber, Mary Taylor 216–17 “Humiliation thesis, the” 210–16, 219 Hutchinson, William R. 189 Hybridity, and Christianity 107, 110–11, 119–20, 125 Ibsen, Henrik 196 Idealism 196–7 Identification in colonial context 121, 149 conversion as 120–25 Imfule mission station 13, 134, 141 Indies, colonial 59, 79 Indonesia, mission in 59 Ingebrigtsen, Anna 156, 168 Ingebrigtsen, Erik 156, 168, 170, 223 Inhlazatshe mission station 13, 113, 119, 167, 171, 190 Anglo-Zulu War and 202–3, 204n12, 214, 220–21 Boer settlers and 194 converts and employees at 139–40, 155, 179 land for 168–70, 222 Sunday services at 131–2 visual representation of 183–8 Itafamasi mission station 90n11

256 index Jesus see Christ Johnson, William Percival 29, 173 Jørgensen, Torstein 8–9, 49, 92, 114, 127 on conversion 107 on delay of African ordinations 95–6 on itinerant preaching 228, 229 on missionaries and Zulu royals 161–3 on missionary ideas about civilization 190 on resistance to mission 131, 155–7 on station communities 152–4 on stations as homesteads 157, 159–60 on Sunday services and exchange 134 on why H. Schreuder was granted land 36 Jung, Carl Gustav 15 Junod, Rev. Henri-Alexandre 46 Kapteijns, Lidwien 9n13 Kaurin, Bishop Jens M.P. 101 Keane, Webb 58–9, 129, 145 Kenya, mission in 117 Keto, C. Tsheloane 22, 196, 224, 233–4 Kholwa 90, 108, see also Converts Kielland, Rev. Jan 55, 107, 108, 134, 143, 158–9, 192, 228 Kirkaldy, Alan 45, 183, 187–8 Kirkwood, Deborah 91 Knudsen, Rev. Christopher 207 Krige, Eileen J. 115 Kuruman mission station 158 Kwahlabisa mission station 13, 14, 223n57 Kwamagwaza mission station 192 Labor division of on stations 39–40, 64–5, 88, 139, 154 supply and regulation of in Natal 35–6, 41, 45–6, 147, 224–5 Laidlaw, James 197 Land converts live on station 153 missionaries obtain 35–8, 150, 163, 168–70, 195–6, 221–3 missionary rule over 19, 100, 160–64, 223–4 race and 22, 43–4, 160–64, 221–5, 233–4 Landau, Paul 20–21, 30, 91, 103, 135n7, 140, 162 on African names chosen for God 52, 157 on conversion 105, 109 on missionaries as priest-healers 137 on rainmaking 136

on rectilinearity 43 on resistance to conversion 157 Landscape 38 colonial culture carried through 43 missionaries took hold of 20, 43–6 Language, and colonialism 17, 33, see also Translation; Zulu language Larsen, Martha 13, 65, 67, 83, 167 absence of information about 88–9 Anglo-Zulu War and 203, 204n12 at Empangeni 138–9 family life of 81 at Inhlazatshe 170–72 sets up Umphumulo 39–46, 142–3 at Umphumulo 73, 85, 88 Larsen, Rev. Lars 12–13, 55, 61–7, 69n25, 167, 185 Anglo-Zulu War and 202, 203, 204n12, 208, 213–14, 217, 220, 221 on being tied to the station 230 Boer settlers and 194–5 converts and 111–12, 116–17 criticism of Europeans 190 at Empangeni 136, 138–9 experiences of loneliness, threat 170–72, 178 family life of 13, 81, 88–9 at Inhlazatshe 113, 119, 131–2, 145–6, 155, 170, 177 on land and race 222 medical services of 135 on preaching 48, 50, 54 rainmaking of 136 on reading classes 145–6 relationship with colleagues 72–4, 83, 98–9 sets up Umphumulo 39–46, 142–3 at Umphumulo 73, 80, 85, 88 on wish to change Zulu society 179–81 Latour, Bruno 58–9 Legassick, Martin 189, 203n10 Leisegang, Rev. Hans Christian 53–4, 106–7, 183, 184 (Fig. 3), 186, 212, 215, 228 Lindquist, Galina 106 Literacy the Bible and 42, 143–6 of Norwegian missionaries (Lutheran, pietistic) 142–51 orality and 144–5, 148–51 Livingstone, Dr. David 189 Lloyd, Katherine 93–4 Lobola (bridewealth) 94, 140, 157, 161, 180–81

index London Missionary Society (LMS) 43, 76, 89, 96n25, 102–3, 137, 143, 153, 158, 160, 164, 173n, 189 Löwenthal, Emilie 83 Lutheranism see Evangelicalism; Christianity; Haugeanism; Luther, catechism of; Moravianism; Pietism Luther, Martin, catechism of 85, 112, 144 Luthuli, Albert 165n69 MacKenzie, John M. 45 Madagascar, Norwegian mission in 10n14, 42n, 76n, 96n25, 100n32, 127–8, 178 Mahlabathini mission station 13, 54, 223 Mahoney, Michael 39, 93–4, 132, 149, 154 Maphumulo mission station 37, 132 Maqamusela (convert) 140 Marks, Shula 149 Marriage mission stations and 152–4, 156–7, 159 Zulu regiments and 31, 153 see also Families; Lobola; Missionaries: wives of; Polygyny Marsh, Mary 90n11 Marsh, Rev. Samuel 90n11 Marx, Karl 129 Masculinity, of missionaries 98 Maxwell, David 211, 235 Mbenga, Bernard K. 20 on Anglo-Zulu War 202, 203, 205, 206n18, 209–10, 214 Mbonambi people 31 Medicine missionary use of 36–7, 133, 135–8, 170–71 Zulu traditional use of 37, 139–40 Meintjes, Sheila 40, 40n21, 153, 160 Memmi, Albert 165 Metaphors, used by missionaries 171–2, 175–8 Methodological agnosticism 15 Mfecane 32 Mini, Stephanus 94n23 Missionaries act as diviners, herbalists 36–7, 135, 136–8 act as homestead heads 157–60 act as rainmakers 35, 135–8 African 20, 90–94, 102–3 Africanization of roles of 136–8, 158 aid colonialism 46, 56–7, 177, 189–90, 194–7, 209–13, 215–16, 226–7, 234 arrive in Natal 33, 37–8

257

attitudes to African pastors 5, 86–7, 93–4, 95–7, 102–3 bodies of 60, 71–5, 80–84 children of 66, 71, 74–5, 80–81, 82 colonial “double vision” of 100–103, 117–18, 121–5 criticism of colonialism 3–7, 162, 193, 195, 197, 213–14 criticism of Europeans 190–95 educational training of 12–13 education offered by 29, 40–42, 95–6, 142–51, 223–4 (see also Education) experience loneliness, threat 170–74 female 13, 89, 91 “humiliation thesis” of 210–16, 219 ideas about civilization and 189–93 increasingly wish to change Zulu society 180–82 letters from: source criticism of 64–6, 68–71, 87–92, 140, 175–8 (see also Mission sources) medical services of 36–7, 133, 135–8, 170–71 metaphors used by 171–2, 175–8 money and 18, 60–62, 64 race and 3–7, 77–9, 98, 99–100, 102, 123–4, 165–6, 192, 209n28, 212, 226, 230–31 relationship with converts 85–130 relationship with home boards 67, 70–71, 72–3, 80, 89, 99, 182, 207, 209–10, 224 relationship with Zulu royals 12, 36–7, 109, 141, 143, 158, 160–64, 173, 181, 191–2 rivalry among 168–9 settlers and 35–6, 147, 193–5, 212, 215–16, 223 suspected of witchcraft 139–42 as teachers (umfundisi) 143 tied to their stations 6–7, 226–30 understanding of church and state 160–64 use violence 159, 159n63 utopic vision of 178, 198 wives of 66, 71, 74–5, 82–3, 89 work out their salvation 174 see also names of individual missionaries and mission societies “Missionary imperialism” 211 Mission, differing analyses of 56–9, 126–30, 137–8 Mission magazines see Mission sources; Norsk Missions-Tidende

258 index Mission Reserves, Natal 22, 35–8, 196, 223, 224, 233 Mission School, Stavanger 12–13, 64, 72n29, 85, 95, 96, 98 Mission sources, source criticism of missionary letters and reports 64–6, 68–71, 87–92, 140, 175–8 mission images (art) 175n, 182–8 mission images (metaphors) 175–8 mission magazines 64, 177, 210–16 mission maps 175–7 Mission stations Africanization of 158 architecture on 29–30, 39, 42–5, 73, 86, 90, 145, 153, 170, 185–7 as basis for African political elite 165, 231 bodies and 60, 71–5, 83–4, 118–19, 139, 145–6 clothes worn on 45–6, 112–15, 120, 121–2 converts and employees on 40–42, 45–6, 86, 88, 90–92, 131, 152–6 as counter-sites 198 as different from surroundings 39–46, 118–19, 120–26, 145–6, 148, 154, 164–6, 178–82, 190–92 differing analyses of 56–9 division of labor on 39–40, 64–5, 88, 139, 154 education offered on 29, 40–42, 95–6, 142–51, 223–4 entrepreneurial activity on 148–9 as extraterritorial (land of the whites) 160–64, 191, 194–5, 197 farming on 39–40, 45, 139, 186 food on 39, 66 furniture on 62–3, 76–8, 80, 145, 191 gardens on 45, 186 gender of people drawn to 138–9, 142, 152–6 as heterotopias 197–8 as homesteads 157–60 land obtained for 35–8, 163, 168–70, 195–6, 222–3 missionaries tied to 6–7, 226–30 missionary perceptions of 167–98 as models of an alternative society 178– 82, 229 new commodities on 132–3 normalization of colonialism and 46 race and 119, 123–4, 160–64, 165–6, 226, 230–31 as refuges 152, 154–5, 158, 163 resident communities on 151–6, 164–5 risks and threats of 138–51, 155–7, 160–64

as rival spaces 155–7, 160–64 services and exchange on 132–8, 170 “station strategy” 4, 6–7, 227–30 as third space 120–26 timetable adopted on 40–42 as trophies 168–70 as utopias 198 visual representations of 182–8 Zulu perceptions of 131–66 see also names of individual stations Mitchell, W.J. Thomas 118 Moffat, Rev. Robert 12, 54, 158, 160, 173, 189, 214 Moi, Toril 196 Mokoena, Hlonipha 117, 150n49 Money, missionary handling of 18, 60–62, 64 Moravianism, Norway 11–12, 82, 98, 123, 211 Moravians, Cape 103, 121–2 Moses (Zibokjane kaGudu) (convert) 92n17, 95–7 Mpande, King 32, 153, 171, 201–2 grants use of land for stations 35–8, 168, 170, 195, 229 makes stations extraterritorial 161–4, 194–5 missionaries and 12, 35–7, 160–64, 181 Msane, Saul 165n69 Msimang, Selby 165n69 Mudimbe, V.Y. 147 Munt, Sally 198 Musi, Chief 39, 149 Myklebust, Olav Guttorm 8, 36, 87, 216, 228, 234–5 Mzilikazi, King 173 Names baptismal 115–17, 118, 120 Zulu customary 115 Natal, Colony of 203, 234 British annexation of 32–4 British colonial rule of (see Colonial rule) granted responsible government 233 missionaries arrive in 33, 35–8 Mission Reserves in 22, 35–8, 196, 223, 224, 233 policies on land and race 224–5, 233–4 puts pressure on Zululand 201 Natalia, Republic of 32 Native Home Missionary Society 93 Ndlela, Rev. Simon 86, 92, 96–7, 230 Nembula, Ira 165n69 Nembula, John 165n69 Neylan, Susan 91 Ngidi, Jonathan 93, 94n23

index Ngidi, Rev. Mbiyana (Umbijane) 88n8, 97 baptism of 90, 90n11 career after Umphumulo 91–4 at Umphumulo 62, 88–90, 144 Ngidi, William 93 Ngwato rulers 162 Nieuwe Republiek 221, 222 Nigeria, mission in 57 Nilsen, Rev. Petter Gottfred 230 Nome, John 87, 98, 207 Noodsberg outstation 93, 132 Norgaard, Rev. Ole 228 Norris, Rebecca Sachs 109, 111, 116n56, 120 Norsk Missions-Tidende 4n2 copies of sent to missionaries 70 frontispiece of 175n source criticism of 64–6, 68–71, 87–92, 140, 177, 207, 209, 212–14, see also mission sources writing of women in 100 Norway mission movement in 10–12 union with Sweden 17, 201 Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) establishment of 10–13 missionaries in Southern Africa, list of 13n20 mission stations in Southern Africa, list of 13 name of 3n1 see also Home boards, missionary relationship with Norwegian Mission Tidings see Norsk Missions-Tidende Oftebro, Dr. Christian 72n29 Oftebro, Guri 13, 66 family life of 75, 80 at Umphumulo 73 Oftebro, Rev. Ommund C. 12–13, 48, 55, 66, 113, 185 Anglo-Zulu War and 202, 204–9, 210–11, 213, 217, 219–20, 222 Cetshwayo and 141, 161, 173, 206 converts and 100–101, 123–4, 149, 180 at Empangeni 109, 144 at Eshowe 95, 119, 133 family life of 13, 66n16, 75, 80–81 as homestead head 158 on preaching 50, 54, 228 relationship with colleagues 66n16, 98–9 sets up Umphumulo 39–46, 142–3 as superintendent 69, 208 at Umphumulo 73

259

Okkenhaug, Inger Marie 91 Olsen, Elise 63–4 Olsen, Johan 63–4, 64n10, 99, 168 Orality, and literacy 144–5, 148–51 Orange Free State 203, 234 Ordination see Pastors Osborn, Melmoth 214, 219, 220 Oscarsberg mission station 96, 207 Pastors in African-initiated churches 94n23 delayed ordination of Africans as 5, 86–7, 93–4, 95–100, 103, 129–30 delayed ordination of Norwegians as 98–9 Paternalism, of missionaries 98–100 Patriarchal practices of missionaries 154, 157–60 of Zulus 154, 157–60 Patteson, Bishop John Coleridge 222 Paul, St. 115, 174 Peel, J.D.Y. 57–8, 68, 91, 104, 127, 128 Pels, Peter 7, 120, 165, 166, 175, 216–17 Phakathwayo, Chief 39 Philip, Rev. John 43, 189 Pietism 10–12 conversion and 105, 211 ideas about civilization and 192 images of crucifixion in 54, 81–2 literacy and 145 paternalism of 98–100, 160 powerful God of 52–3 sacrifice and 67n20, 78 (see also Self-denial) separation from politics 189 sincerity and 72, 103, 105, 217 (see also Sincerity) virtues and control in 72 Word of God and 181 see also Christianity Pine, Sir Benjamin 33–4 Pirie mission station 136 Polygyny African convert criticism of 94 missionary criticism of 49, 142, 161, 163, 180–81 perceived as hindrance to mission 153, 181 political economy and 157 political instability in 1870s and 202 see also Marriage Pontoppidan, Erik 144 Poor whites see Class Porterfield, Amanda 13n19, 48, 142, 154–5 Prayer, Christian 59, 145, 151, 188, 212

260 index continuity with Zulu customs 110 medical assistance and 135–8 as part of timetable on stations 40 for rain 136–8 seen as powerful by missionaries 171 Preaching, missionary 48–50, 53–6 itinerant 4, 6–7, 182, 226–9 Predelli, Line Nyhagen 76n, 182 Price, Richard 169, 173, 173n, 209n28, 211n31, 216 Printing 146–7, see also Bible; Literacy Pritchett, James 45, 110, 125 “Problem of presence,” of God 30, 47, 58–9, 229, 231 Qwabe people 39, 149 Race class and 18–19, 77–78, 124 land and 22, 43–4, 100, 160–64, 221–5, 233–4 missionaries and 3–7, 77–9, 98, 99–100, 102, 123–4, 165–6, 192, 209n28, 212, 226, 230–31 mission stations and 119, 123–4, 160–64, 165–6, 226, 230–31 Rainmaking, by missionaries 35, 135–8 Ranger, Terence 20, 104 Reading see Education; Literacy Rectilinearity 43, 187 Resistance, African, to mission Christianity 131–2, 138–44, 155–7 Richardson, Laurel 167 Ricoeur, Paul 178 Robbins, Joel 14, 16, 105–6, 110, 119n60, 128 Robert, Dana 80 Robertson, Rev. Robert 99, 168, 170, 192, 220 Rorke’s Drift mission station 94 Ross, Rev. John 136 Ross, Robert 20–21, 189, 203n10 Rüther, Kirsten 114, 121–2, 153, 159n63 Samuelsen, Siver 63–7, 73, 83, 99 Samuelsen, Thorine 63–7, 73–5, 83, 99 Sanneh, Lamin 56 Schreuder, Bishop Hans 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 55, 66, 71, 128n, 142, 185 Anglo-Zulu War and 201, 203, 207, 208n25, 215, 217, 222, 227 break with NMS 207 class background of 77 converts and 85, 96, 100–101 criticism of colonialism 7 criticism of Europeans 191, 195

criticism of Zulu religion 52, 106 on families 66, 79–80, 82–3 family life of 81, 83 handling of money 60–61, 83 legacy of 85–6 obtains land for stations 35–7, 168–70, 222, 223n57 preaching of 54, 104, 227, 228, 230 rainmaking of 136 on stations as land of the whites (isilungu) 162, 191, 194 as superintendent 60–61, 64–5, 67, 69, 71, 73–4, 96n25, 98–9 translations into Zulu 33, 49, 50, 51, 146 use of medicine 36–7, 135 Schreuder Mission 13–14, 154n54, 207, 208n25, 215, 223n57, 234 Scott, Governor John 113 Self-denial, pietistic virtue of 71–5 Sentiments in colonial society 78–80 among missionaries 170–74 pietistic and Evangelical 11 Settlers African labor in Natal and 35–6, 41, 45–6, 55, 147 encroach on Zulu land 202, 221 establish Nieuwe Republiek 221–2 establish Transvaal 168 farms of 21, 43–4 missionaries and 35–6, 147, 193–5, 212, 215–16, 223 in Natal 32–3, 233 Sexuality 81 in colonial society 76, 79 missionary attitudes toward 66, 76, 79–80, 154 Zulu attitudes toward 142, 154 Shades 37, 47–8, 51, 53, 135, 141–2 missionary criticism of 49, 52, 106, 142, 147, 161, 163, 180, 181 relationship of converts to 107, 110, 119 Shaka, King 31–2, 37, 39 Shange, Mathenjwaze 85n1 conversion of 85, 87–90 departure from Umphumulo 91–2 legacy of 85–6 at Umphumulo 87–90 Shembe, Isaiah 149–50 Shepstone, John W. 202 Shepstone, Sir Theophilus 33–5, 44, 196, 201–4, 208, 224 Sherlock, Peter 89 Shona people, mission among 20

index Simensen, Jarle 8–9, 51n38, 126–7, 143n30, 154n54, 159n63, 193n47, 205n16, 208n25 on “the humiliation thesis” 211, 215 on itinerant preaching 228n5, 229n6 on missionary ideas about civilization 190 on quarantine of stations 162 on the “station strategy” 4, 227 on station strife 159 on transaction theory 133, 137–8 on why H. Schreuder was granted land 36–7 Sincerity as antithesis to corrupting civilization 190 importance of in Pietism 11, 105, 145, 217 Keane on Protestantism and 59, 129 organizational control and 72 problem of gauging in others 103, 111, 122n65 as requirement for baptism 111–12 Skeie, Karina Hestad 42n, 80, 96n25, 174 on missionary ideas about civilization 190 on missionary metaphors 177–8 on problem of materiality 127–8 on source criticism 69 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) 18, 38, 96n25, 99, 103, 131, 149, 152, 168–9, 202–3, 204 Sofa see Furniture Soja, Edward W. 167, 197 Sommerfelt, Halfdan 36 Sønstabø, Endre 229n6 Source criticism see Mission sources South Africa, Union of 234 Southwold, Martin 15 Space 20–22 anthropology of 21 Bhabha on 120–21, 125 bodies and 42–3, 76, 118–19, 145–6 Bourdieu on 42n Christianity and 4, 7, 182, 226, 231–3 domestic 20–21, 154 Fanon on 42–3, 76, 118–19 Foucault on 197–8 Gupta and Ferguson on 21, 231 heterotopic 197–8 imagination and 167 mission stations as different 39–46, 118–19, 120–26, 145–6, 148, 154, 164–6, 178–82, 190–92 self and 42–3, 76, 118–19 Soja on 167, 197

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in South African history 20–21 Spatial Christianization 182 Spaulding, Jay 9n13 Springvale mission station 51 State, colonial see Colonial rule State, Zulu see Zulu kingdom “Station strategy” 4, 6–7, 227–30, see also Mission stations Stavem, Rev. Ole African pastors and 86 Anglo-Zulu War and 202, 204, 208, 211, 213, 217 converts and 114, 116, 122 criticism of Europeans 191 on evangelistic outreach 228 on first converts 155–6 on land for stations 222–3 on O. Oftebro 208 Steenberg, Rev. Ole 192n39, 216 Stoler, Ann Laura 22, 76, 82–3 on class and race in colonial society 18–19, 77–8, 124 on differences in colonial society 74 on epistemic murk 218, 219 St Paul’s mission station 99 Strayer, Robert 117 Sullivan, Shannon 42–3, 118–19 Sunday services 119, 190 attendance at 131–2, 214, 230 congregants’ behavior during 50, 54, 132 order of service for 49, 146 as part of an exchange 133–5, 138 as part of timetable on stations 40–41 Sundkler, Bengt 149 Swedish Missionary Society 38, 96, 103, 131, 207 Swiss Mission (Mission Romande) 33n7, 99, 146 Taussig, Michael 19, 218 Tax, colonial 44, 133, 224–5 Theology, of missionaries 233 evolving around Anglo-Zulu War 211 expressed in metaphors 177 justifying missionary authority 160 materiality and 127–8 race and 3–7 Third space, mission stations as 120–26 Thomas, Nicholas J. 124 Thonga people, Swiss mission among 33n7, 99, 146 Time missionary concepts of 40–42 Zulu concepts of 41

262 index Timoni, Chief 223 Titlestad, Rev. Karl 191, 228 Tjelle, Kristin Fjelde 72n29, 80, 82, 96, 208 on missionary masculinity 98 on preaching and “secular” work 228 on S. Ndlela 86–7, 92, 96–7, 230 Tønnesen, Arnt 63–4, 64n10, 99 Transaction theory 8, 137–8 Translation by missionaries into Zulu 33, 49–52, 144, 146–7 Sanneh on 56 Transvaal Native Congress 165n69 Transvaal (South African Republic) 168, 194, 195, 202, 203, 221, 234 mission in 114, 121–2, 145, 153, 159n63 Tswana people, mission among 14, 29, 52, 54, 56–7, 76, 102, 105, 126, 128, 137, 143, 160, 162, 164, 189 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 150–51 Tyler, Rev. Josiah 93 Uana (Unomaganga)(convert) 90, 111 Ubazambili (employee, Umphumulo) 139 Ubenjamini (convert) 101 Udaniele (convert) 159n63 Udland, Guri 13, 80 Udland, Rev. Tobias 12–13, 38, 55, 185 converts and 111 family life of 13, 80–81 relationship with colleagues 98–9 at Umphumulo 45, 91, 131 as vice magistrate 196 Uitkomst 35 Ulina (convert) 107 Ulovisa (convert) 100–101 Umatendhjwaze see Shange, Mathenjwaze Umatikalala (employee, Umphumulo) 90, 144 Umbijane see Ngidi, Mbiyana Umbonambi mission station 13, 223 Umlazi mission station 35 Umphumulo mission station 3, 13, 36n, 64, 170, 190 architecture at 39, 42–5, 73 budget at 18, 61 clothes worn at 112–13 converts and employees at 86, 88, 90, 91–2, 96–7, 111, 139–40, 144, 152, 192n39 daily life at 135–6 daily timetable at 40–42 education at 29, 40, 42, 142–3, 223–4 furniture at 62–3, 76–8, 80, 191

land for 36, 196, 223 name of 36 Natal government and 36, 196, 223–4, 234 number of people at 152–3 setting up 39–46 Sunday services at 131 teachers college at 96, 216 as third space 126 in the twentieth century 3, 36, 51, 86, 216, 234–5 visual representations of 183–8 Umvoti mission station 43 Umvuzane (convert) 140, 192n39 Ungoye mission station 13, 222 Ungvabaji (employee, Inhlazatshe) 139 Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) 29, 113, 134, 173 Unjekile (employee, Empangeni) 143 uNkulunkulu (Zulu creator, first ancestor) 37, 157 chosen as name for God 50–52 Unodwengu royal homestead 168, 194 Unokutemba (convert) 100–101, 141 Untunjambili mission station 14 Usirajo, Chief 191 Utabita (Unomise)(convert) 90 Uthlapeni (catechumen) 107 Utotongwane (catechumen) 140 Vansina, Jan 21 Venda people, mission among 187 Venn, Henry 189 Warneck, Gustav 189 Weir, Jennifer 52, 119 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) 36, 102–3, 152, 173n, 209n28 Wettergreen, Rev. Paul 53, 107, 146, 162, 180 White, Hayden 128 Williams (Magistrate) 190 Willis, Justin 113, 134, 156, 157, 159n63 Wilson, Monica 47–8 Witchcraft 48, 107, 139–42, 152, 158 missionaries and converts suspected of 139–42, 145, 156, 157, 163, 173 Witt, Rev. Otto 207 Wolseley, Sir Garnet 18, 77, 207, 214, 219, 221 Women see Gender Worger, William 52–4, 106, 110, 143, 160 Wright, John 30–32

index Xhosa people mission among 35, 76, 149, 169, 173, 209n28, 211n31, 216 Ninth Frontier War against 205 Younge, Charlotte Mary 222 Yoruba people, mission among 57–8 Zibhebhu, Prince 221 Zimbabwe 20, 59, 231 Zinn, Howard 25 Zulu homesteads 20–21, 38, 48, 73–4, 154, 156–7 Zulu kingdom 17 Anglo-Zulu War 201–4, 206, 213–14 civil war of 1880s 215, 221 founding of 31–2, 37, 39 missionaries grow increasingly critical of 180–82

263

regiments in 31, 153, 161, 181, 206, 214 Zululand see Zulu kingdom Zulu language 33 missionary relationship with 48–52, 55, 116–17, 147–8, 223–4 settler relationship with 55 Zulu people, definition of 30–31, 33, 39 Zulu royals relationship to missionaries (see under Cetshwayo; Mpande) ritual powers of 136, 141 see also Cetshwayo; Dingane; Dinuzulu; Mpande; Shaka; Zibhebhu; Zulu kingdom Zulu traditional religion 47–53, 115, 136 see also Diviners; Medicine; Shades; uNkulunkulu; Witchcraft