A Space Too Vast and Silent? German Deaconesses and the Patriarchy of the Berlin Mission in Apartheid Transvaal

ein Raum zu riesig und still? Deutsche Diakonissinnen und das Patriarchat der Berliner mission im Transvaal unter Apartheid Unverheiratete deutsche Missionarinnen, die während der ersten Jahrzehnte der Apartheid nach Südafrika kamen, fanden eine Missionsleitung vor Ort, die von älteren Männern autoritär dominiert wurde und sich weigerte, die Apartheidpolitik der im Jahre 1948 gewählten Regierung zu kritisieren. Am Beispiel einer einzelnen Missionarin aus Ostdeutschland versucht der Aufsatz, die vorhandenen Quellen zu hinterfragen und festzustellen, welche Möglichkeiten einer Frau offen standen, die in manchen Fragen die Annahmen der Missionsleitung nicht teilte

Converts and conservatives: missionary representations of African rulers in the Northern Transvaal, c. 1870-1900

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Berlin Mission Society made strenuous efforts to convert the rulers of the people in whose areas they worked in the Northern Transvaal. In this they were largely unsuccessful. This raises questions about what forces influenced success and failure, and how the missionaries interpreted this. In this article, we interrogate the Berlin Missions Society’s accounts of the life and death of August Makhahane, a ruler of the Vhavenda who converted to Christianity, against the background of the accounts dealing with Matsiokwane Leboho, a ruler of the Bahananwa who did not convert. Through such a comparison, we aim at exploring the contrasted ways in which the Berlin missionaries reported about the two rulers

Gendered ruptures and continuities in the Venda traditional leadership from C. 1990 to 2020

This article approaches traditional leadership disputes amongst and within Venda royal houses over the past three decades (from the end of grand apartheid to the presidency of Mr Cyril Ramaphosa) while investigating the reasons for the importance of such traditional leadership positions in modern South Africa. In the light of the most recent disputes around the right of women to ascend to the highest Venda authority, historical precedents around practices of female leadership amongst the Vhavenda are considered. Amongst the continuities observed, are the inevitable limitations to traditional authority: a need to be legitimated from “within” and sanctioned from “above”, by whoever controls the greater nation-state. The discontinuities can be observed in the nature of the arguments on both sides. The historical account pays attention to popular protests, government-appointed commissions, court cases and appeals to the principles of equality in the South African constitution

Reflections on the mission(s) to capture the 'reader' and 'book' in southern African art

This article presents some early reflections from a cultural historical project on the visualisation of reading practices. The focus is limited to images of people reading. The pervasiveness of such images in popular visual culture is illustrated, and how this relates to the established tradition amongst Western artists to paint the image of the reader. A number of scholars have contributed to the image of the reader in art as a field of study, all confirming the particular significance of depicting woman readers in Western art. The current investigation asks how, from our vantage point in the South, the representation, or non-representation, of readers in Africa, specifically southern Africa, stands within, or in opposition to, or in conversation with, the canonised tradition in Western art. The appropriation and negation of Western artistic conventions in the popular proliferation of visual images are also being considered. For the South African discussion, the artist Gerhard Sekoto is highlighted, and some of the contexts which helped shape his visualisations of people reading are being traced.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcrc202016-04-30hb201

'n Vergelyking tussen Colin Rae en Christoph Sonntag se weergawes van die Boer-Hananwa-oorlog van 1894 (Afrikaans)

Please read the abstract (Summary) in the section 07back of this document The published edition of this thesis is also available in English: Kriel, Lize. The 'Malaboch' books : Kgalusi in the 'civilization of the written word' Stuttgart, Germany : Franz Steiner Verlag, 2009. (Missionsgeschichtliches Archiv; Bd 13)Thesis (DPhil (History))--University of Pretoria, 2005.Historical and Heritage Studiesunrestricte

A German-Christian network of letters in colonial Africa as a repository for ‘ordinary’ biographies of women, 1931-1967

This study explores the possibilities of extracting biographies of ‘ordinary Africans’, especially women, from the epistolary networks of a transcontinental Lutheran community of readers. Due to the enthusiastic efforts of a number of German deaconesses, women from British colonial Africa whose narrations might otherwise not have been recorded, participated in conversations with women in Nazi, and thereafter West as well as East Germany. Mission evidence supports the argument that in colonial Africa religion opened up one of the few spaces for African and European women to collaborate in an otherwise segregated society. While the network was initiated in the name of their common faith and sustained with German church funding (and British colonial infrastructure), the content of the letters was far from restricted to religious matters. The article contends that these epistles reflected an awareness amongst rural female African participants of their position in a much larger geopolitical space – and even a world church. Thus the label ‘ordinary’ refers to the status of the African women writers in their local communities and church congregations rather than their horizons of expectation. Their fragmentary biographies or life-histories, from both colonial Tanganyika and the Transvaal, need to be viewed within the context of their interaction with their German facilitators and the members of the female Christian reading community in Europe – who were the intended audience envisaged by the African women narrators. The overwhelming majority of non-western participants in the missionary enterprise are nameless: ‘native agent,’ or ‘bible woman,’ or ‘native teacher’ is how they appear in the missionary records, and in the missionary narratives of white, male, clerical heroism. It is almost impossible to restore the full extent of non-western agency in the building of Christian institutions in the British empire, and the British imperial sphere of influence, but any accurate history must repeatedly look for and acknowledge those acts of participation. Jeffrey Coxhttp://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss20hb2013cp201

Heimat in the veld? German Afrikaners of missionary descent and their imaginings of women and home

the depiction of Germans abroad by Stefan Manz as “extremely heterogeneous groups or individuals” is as applicable to South Africa as anywhere else. So is the apparent contradiction of self-proclaimed ‘Germanness’ alongside significant evidence of German- South Africans’ successful integration into local society. Keeping in mind, as Joan W. Scott summarises it, that identities are ascribed, embraced and rejected in complex discursive processes, and accepting the notion of culture as performance, I attempt to illustrate in this study how actors who would have been ascribed a ‘Germanness’ in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century embodied different roles - at particular moments in time, as well as over time. I find the term “occasionalism”, coined by cultural historian Peter Burke, very productive: “on different occasions (moments, locales) or in different situations (in the presence of different people) the same person behaves in different ways.”http://www.vr-elibrary.de/loi/gegehb2016Visual Art

Winged women on book covers for contemporary African fiction : Shubnum Khan’s creation for Mohale Mashigo’s intruders (2018)

In her collection of short stories, Intruders, Mohale Mashigo (2018) draws on popular culture as well as local cultural memories as invested in South African folktales, to conjure up a fantastical world in which spirituality is often invoked. In this article, I consider the way in which the visual image of a woman with angelic wings designed for the book cover by artist Shubnum Khan, serves the purpose of marketing the commodity by means of connotations presumed to be familiar to potential readers, but also still suggestive enough to stimulate, rather than prescribe, the visual imagination ignited in the process of reading. I link book cover designer Peter Mendelsund’s argument that the reading imagination, although fuelled by memory, remains “loosely associative” and “not overtly coherent”, with Ingvild Gilhus’s cultural-historical appraisal of the angel’s appeal as such a malleable symbol of (increasingly, specifically) female superhuman capabilities. I argue that the cover image ‘works’ because of its ability to kindle memories of precolonial African spirituality, associations with Christianity, as well as images circulating in mass media.The South African National Institute for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NIHSS).http://www.pharosjot.comam2022Visual Art

Gendered raptures and continuities in the Venda traditional leadership from C.1990 to 2020

This article approaches traditional leadership disputes amongst and within Venda royal houses over the past three decades (from the end of grand apartheid to the presidency of Mr Cyril Ramaphosa) while investigating the reasons for the importance of such traditional leadership positions in modern South Africa. In the light of the most recent disputes around the right of women to ascend to the highest Venda authority, historical precedents around practices of female leadership amongst the Vhavenda are considered. Amongst the continuities observed, are the inevitable limitations to traditional authority: a need to be legitimated from “within” and sanctioned from “above”, by whoever controls the greater nation-state. The discontinuities can be observed in the nature of the arguments on both sides. The historical account pays attention to popular protests, government-appointed commissions, court cases and appeals to the principles of equality in the South African constitution.https://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/jch/indexdm2022Historical and Heritage StudiesVisual Art

Review: "A Tapestry of Lives" By June McKinnon (2004)

Cape Town: Kwela Books 112 pp ISBN 0-7957-0122-5Tydskrif vir Letterkunde • 43(2) • 2006: 251-25