The British Intrusion and the Coming of Missionaries

“ ... all Bushmen captured by commandos or by private individuals might be retained in perpetual slavery by the Boers—they and their children after them; that the custom ... [of keeping Khoikhoi children until 25 years] be restored; and that no Hottentot who left his employment should in future be allowed to take refuge in any ‘colony’, i.e., village, but that after his complaints had been noted down he should be forthwith returned to his ‘lord and master’.” Marais, The Cape Coloured People, p.113.

• The Second Coming or Second Advent;
  
• The millennium—1000 years of peace, Kingdom of God.
  

1. despite the allegations of many scholars, big business did not provide much support for missions; D. Livingstone made a big point of going to the Chambers of Commerce etc. in Britain to speak (even snubbing a number of churches), but the captains of industry, while cheering claims of the benefits to trade that the promotion of Christianity would bring, gave little money to the missions. Most of the money for the missions to central and east Africa that Livingstone stimulated came from the churches and the traditional supporters of missions (there are certainly examples of successful businessmen contributing generously as individuals, but these were not the norm nor did they provide most of the funds). Most supporters of missions were from the lower middle and upper working classes, especially in the 1st half of the 19th C.
   
   
2. African trade was never very large or important compared to other areas, yet Africa always received a disproportionate share of missionaries and mission resources.
   
   - on the other hand, Latin America, which was always much more important for trade purposes than Africa, received only minor amounts of attention. If capitalists were really jerking the puppet strings of the mission societies and missionaries, why didn’t they direct more attention to S. America?
   
   
3. even more, in places like India and China, business was lukewarm and frequently even hostile to mission activity; missionaries stirred up trouble and that interfered with their trade and business.
   

• all contracts had to be registered with the local magistrate—to avoid employers changing the terms unilaterally and after the fact;
  
• placed limitations on what could be in the contracts: limited what could be claimed as debt (e.g., excluded liquor) and these items had to be spelled out in the contract;
  
• limited the ‘apprenticeship’ of children and young people to 10 years;
  
• reduced abuses under the ‘vagrancy’ laws.
  

1. first, the Masters and Servants law of England was introduced. By our standards, this system gave employers much more power than we would be comfortable with; i.e., employment was a contract with many rights to the employer to prosecute. While employees could also prosecute for failures of the employer, lack of knowledge and lack of money on the part of servants meant that the balance of advantage was more for the employer. Nevertheless, this was less one-sided than the previous system had been.
   
   
2. secondly, the missionary pressures and agitations over the first 3 decades of the 19th C eventually led to Ordinance 50 of 1828; this was sometimes called ‘the Magna Carta of the Cape Coloured People’.
   
   • this stated very specifically that there should be no differential legislation; i.e., that ‘Hottentots and other free persons of colour’ shall not be subject to any law to which whites are not also subject. [By ‘differential’, we mean laws that treat people differently depending, in this case, on colour or ‘race’.]
     
   • it also specifically forbad vagrancy laws or other restrictions on movement.
     
   • this was the foundation for the tradition of non-racialism or what is called the ‘Cape liberal tradition’. With only a few exceptions (e.g., some later liquor laws forbad sales to Africans), laws in the Cape did not differentiate or discriminate on the basis of ‘colour’ or ‘race’.
     
   • it also reaffirmed equality before the law.
     
     Note: This did not mean total equality (that did not exist in Britain and in so far as the poor have a more difficult time and cannot afford to pursue all legal rights, it does not exist here in Canada either). Obviously, knowledge and wealth give some great advantage in the courts over those who lack either or both. As well, when the jury system was introduced, only whites sat on juries; this produced some blatantly unjust verdicts. Eventually, the jury system was abolished for all inter-racial cases.
     
   - also, it should be noted that sometimes ways were found to accomplish the same objectives as differential legislation. (One of the best examples was the franchise qualifications when representative government was introduced in 1853. The property and income qualifications made absolutely no mention of colour or race; the qualifications were low enough to admit most white men [although not all] but high enough to exclude most [although not all] non-whites. Later in the 1880s and 90s when Africans began to become voters in larger numbers, the rules were tightened and the bar was raised! We shall discuss this later in Lecture 8—module 12.)
   

Christian Missions and Impact

• in West Africa, they were trying to abolish the slave trade and the traders were not happy to be put out of business.
  
• in South Africa, they clashed with the white settlers over the latter’s treatment of the indigenous peoples and with colonial officials who seemed sympathetic to or influenced by the settlers.
  

1. a government, when looking for grounds to make a claim to an area, used the presence and involvement of its nationals; missionaries could be and were used for this purpose. In this sense, missionaries would be unwitting, passive participants in imperialism.
   
   
2. missionaries often had a decided preference for rule by their own governments; thus, during the scramble, some missionaries began to work consciously to have their territories taken over by their governments rather than a foreign government. Thus, some became active participants in imperialism.
   
   
3. some missionaries became discouraged by limited success (seen especially in south Africa).
   
   - in the early 19th C, missionaries were generally opposed to Br. annexation of territories (in 1835-37, they used their influence to get the British government to disannex Queen Adelaide Land and recall the governor who had annexed it).
   
   1. generally, they hoped to keep out other whites such as traders, settlers and so on because they would try to oppress the indigenous people or they would introduce liquor, guns, prostitution etc.
      
      - what they hoped to achieve was an autonomous indigenous society under traditional leaders who had become Christian; they hoped to convert society as a whole; they hoped to see autonomous, agrarian Christian societies (not simply the same as at home, but better and with less evil).
      
      - however, they found that they were not able to keep out disreputable and unruly whites; especially, the Great Trek of Boer settlers into the interior was a great threat and danger to African societies. Thus, some missionaries began to turn to the British government as a necessary means to protect Africans and to control the white settlers; thus, annexations by the British government seemed a lesser evil.
      
      
   2. some missionaries also came to be discouraged by the relative lack of success in conversions:
      
      - many talked about the ‘stony ground’ upon which their efforts were producing meagre results; also, in the recurring wars, mission stations were destroyed and they saw a lifetime of their work destroyed. Some came to believe that it was the chiefs who were preventing their people from becoming Christians and felt that the power of the chiefs must be destroyed before their mission work could enjoy success. However, in other cases, it was clear that the pressure was coming from the people; some chiefs who showed sympathy to Christianity were threatened with loss of their position. Thus, the cohesion of African society was seen as a stumbling block to the success of Christianity.
      
      - as a result, some missionaries argued that conquest and annexation were a necessary prerequisite for the success of the gospel—e.g., J. C. Warner, Wesleyan Methodist, argued in the 1850s:
      

      “... as they have so resolutely and so perseveringly refused to give to the gospel even an attentive hearing; it seems to me that the way on which they themselves are so obstinately bent is the one which God will make use of to bring about this desirable object; and that the sword must first—not exterminate them, but—break them up as tribes, and destroy their political existence; after which, when thus set free from the shackles by which they are bound, civilisation and christianity will no doubt make rapid progress among them.”
      

      - soon after, Warner resigned from the ministry to become a government agent—i.e., he believed that political control and assimilation were necessary first.
      
      
   3. in addition, as the century wore on, missionaries became more racist; they were still paternalistic and wanted to do good, but they increasingly viewed Africans as inherently inferior:
      
      1. partly this was a result of growing racism in all western societies and missionaries were products of those societies;
         
         
      2. the lack of success of missionary endeavours was attributed to the people themselves; that people could have the gospel preached to them and reject it or perhaps try it for a while and abandon it suggested moral and intellectual inferiority to some missionaries. However, other missionaries noted that Africans were adept at spotting weaknesses in the arguments and presentation of Christianity; Africans asked hard questions!
         

• that led them sometimes into opposing annexations by their governments, although that lessened and virtually disappeared later in the 19th C.
  
• more often it led them into campaigns and activism in trying to ameliorate the conquest and subsesquent treatment of Africans.
  

• the incredible technological superiority which westerners acquired in the 19th C had a drive of its own—“power corrupts”;
  
• there were economic interests and motives, even if frequently exaggerated.
  
• even more important, there were ideological and emotional forces such as, nationalism, racism, and the frantic drive to remain in the club of “great or world powers.”