Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:04:27.219Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘A Sentimental Attachment to the Neighbourhood’: African Christians and Land Claims in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Deborah James  and
Geoffrey Nkadimeng
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

As part of its attempt to understand ‘an apartheid of souls’, this volume is concerned to show how mission activity, particularly that of European-based churches with close links to the expansion of Dutch/Calvinist influence, may have nurtured the local construction of race or ethnic difference in Indonesian and South African society. One well-known account of Christianity in South Africa shows how the interaction between mission and missionised produced a sharply dichotomised sense - experienced by the Tshidi Tswana as the contrast between setsivana and segoa - of difference between indigenous and imported culture. While this shows how processes devoted to undermining it may paradoxically strengthen a sense of cultural identity, what it does not yield is a sense of how Christianity, appropriated within Tswana and other African societies, furnished a means of marking internal distinctions of social class, dovetailing in unexpected ways with ethnic difference. It is such divisions - potently fusing class with ethnicity and having crucial implications for the ownership, reclaiming, and use of land - with which the present paper is concerned.

Type
Conference: ‘An Apartheid of Souls’
Information
Itinerario , Volume 27 , Special Issue 3-4: An Apartheid of Souls , November 2003 , pp. 243 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

2 J.L. and Comaroff, J., ‘The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labour in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People’, American Ethnologist 14/2 (1987)Google Scholar; Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa 1 (Chicago 1991)Google Scholar.

3 See James, D., ‘“Music of Origin”: Class, Social Category and the Performers and Audience of Kiba, a South African Migrant Genre’, Africa 67/3-4 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Bundy, Colin, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Cape Town 1979)Google Scholar.

5 Murray, C., Black Mountain: Land. Class and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State 1880s-1980s (Johannesburg 1992)Google Scholar; La Hausse de la Louvière, P., Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the Lives of Petros Lamula (c. 1881-1948) and Lymon Maling (1889-c. 1936) (Pietermaritzburg 2000) 24, 159–162Google Scholar.

6 Marks, S. and Trapido, S., ‘The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism’ in: The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London 1987) 3Google Scholar.

7 Harries, P., ‘Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: The Emergence of Ethnicity amongst the Tsonga-speakers of South Africa’ in: Vail, L. ed., The Growth of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London 1989)Google Scholar.

8 Poewe, K. and van der Heyden, U., ‘The Berlin Mission Society and its Theology: The Bapedi Mission Church and the Independent Bapedi Lutheran Church’, South African Historical Journal 40 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hexham, I. and Poewe, K., ‘The Spread of Christianity among Whites and Blacks in Transorangia’ in: Elphick, R. and Davenport, R. eds, Christianity in South Africa (Cape Town 1987)Google Scholar.

9 Desmond, C., The Discarded People (Harmondsworth 1971)Google Scholar; Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa 5 (Cape Town 1983)Google Scholar.

10 Land Update (Johannesburg 1994) No. 34:10 and No. 35:15, 19–20Google Scholar.

11 Bernstein, Henry, ‘South Africa's Agrarian Question: Extreme and Exceptional?’ in: The Agrarian Question in South Africa, special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies 23 (2/3-4) (1996)Google Scholar; James, D., ‘“After Years in the Wilderness”: The Discourse of Land Claims in the New South Africa’, Journal of Peasant Studies 27/3-4 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murray, Colin, ‘Land Reform in the Eastern Free State: Policy Dilemmas and Political Conflicts’, Journal of Peasant Studies 23 (2/3-4) (1996)Google Scholar.

12 Geoff Budlender (Director-General of Land Affairs in Mandela's Government), discussion with author, 16 January 2001; Levin, Richard M., ‘Politics and Land Reform in the Northern Province: A Case Study of the Mojapelo Land Claim’ in: Lipton, M. et al. eds, Land, Labour and Livelihoods in Rural South Africa (Durban 1996)Google Scholar; Levin, Richard M. and Weiner, Daniel eds, No More Tears…: Struggles for Land in Mpumalanga, South Africa (Trenton 1994)Google Scholar.

13 Lan, David, Guns and Rain (Berkeley 1985)Google Scholar; Shipton, P., ‘Land and Culture in Tropical Africa: Soils, Symbols and the Metaphysics of the Mundane’, Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Winberg, Marlene and Weinberg, Paul, Back to the Land (Johannesburg 1996) 39Google Scholar.

15 P. Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal (Johannesburg 1983) 158, 168.

16 What God Does, commemorative pamphlet of Berlin Mission Society (Botšhabelo 1965)Google Scholar.

17 Ibid.

18 Rebone Mmasegobe Ramaube, 17 July 1997, Doornkop.

19 What God Does.

20 Andrea Schulze, personal communication.

21 Poewe, and van der Heyden, , ‘Berlin Mission Society’Google Scholar; Sundkler, B.G.M., Bantu Prophets in South Africa (London 1961)Google Scholar.

22 Letter from Sub Native Commissioner, Middelburg, to Secretary for Native Affairs, 15 May 1906.

23 Letter from Department of Native Affairs to Minister of Native Affairs, 7 Dec. 1915.

24 Mamdani, M., Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (London 1996)Google Scholar.

25 Godfrey Mathobela, 14 Jury 1997, Doornkop.

26 For a fuller account of the community's attitudes towards hereditary chiefship. see James, D., ‘Hill of Thorns: Custom, Knowledge and the Reclaiming of a Lost Land in the New South Africa’, Development and Change 31/3-4 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Rebone Mmasegobe Ramaube, 17 Jury 1997, Doornkop.

28 Ibid.

29 Julia Mphela, 15th July 1997, Doornkop.

30 The term is equivalent to the English ‘grade’ as used in schools.

31 Ibid.

32 Rebone Mmasegobe Ramaube, 17 July 1997, Doomkop.

33 Elizabeth Maroga, 2 Dec. 1997, Soweto.

34 These were in Witwatersrand townships like Soweto or Daveyton and nearby towns like Witbank or Middelburg.

35 This was the classic scenario of forced resettlement described in much of the advocacy literature in South Africa: Desmond, Discarded People; Surrplus People Project, Forced Removals.

36 For more details on how these divisions played out in the process of reclaiming the farm, see James, ‘After Years in the Wilderness’; ‘Hill of Thorns’.

37 Elizabeth Maroga, 2 Dec. 1997, Soweto.

38 Marks, S. and Rathbone, R., ‘Introduction’ in: Marks, S. and Rathbone, R. eds, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (London 1982)Google Scholar; La Hausse, Restless Identities.

39 Eva Mankge, 16 July 1997, Doornkop.

40 Eva Moukangoe, 21 May 1997, Doomkop.

41 Eva Mankge, 20 May 1997.

42 Genovese, E., Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York 1976)Google Scholar.

43 Schama, S., The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London 1987) 93–125Google Scholar.

44 Murray, C., ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: Resistance and Abuse in the Life of Solomon Lion (1908-1987)’, Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Muller, C., Rituab of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa (Chicago 1999) 64–65Google Scholar.

46 Schama, , Embarrassment of Riches, 68Google Scholar.

47 Moodie, T. D., The Rise ofAfrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley 1975) 28, 248Google Scholar.

48 Du Toit, A., ‘No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology’, American Historical Review 88/4 (1983)Google Scholar.

49 Delius, , Land Belongs to Us, 166–169Google Scholar.

50 Hexham, and Poewe, , ‘Spread of Christianity among Whites and Blacks’Google Scholar; Schultze, A., ‘Apart-heid of Souls and Equality before God - The Missionaries of the Berlin Mission Society and their Handling of Ethnic and Denominational Identity in South Africa (1840-1940)’, Paper presented at the workshop on Apartheid of Souls: Dutch Colonialism and its Aftermath in Indonesia and South Africa, LSE (2000)Google Scholar.

51 Makhwele Jacobeth Maabe, 14 July, Doornkop; a similar opinion was expressed by Eva Mankge, 16 July.

52 Berry, S., ‘Custom is King’ in: Downs, R.E. and Reyna, S.P. eds, Land and Society in Contemporary Africa (Hanover NH 1989)Google Scholar.

53 Mamdani, , Citizen and SubjectGoogle Scholar; Ashforth, Adam, The Politics of Official Discourse in South Africa (Oxford 1990)Google Scholar.

54 Delius, , Land Belongs to UsGoogle Scholar; Hexham, and Poewe, , ‘Spread of Christianity among Whites and Blacks’, 131–132Google Scholar; Schulze, , ‘Apartheid of Souls and Equality before God’Google Scholar.

55 Landau, Paul, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a South African Kingdom (Oxford 1995)Google Scholar.

56 Comaroff, J., Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago 1985)Google Scholar.

57 Moodie, The Rise ofAfrikanerdom.

58 Levin, , ‘Politics and Land Reform’Google Scholar; Levin, and Weiner, , No More Tears.Google Scholar