FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Spring 1997
Volume 23, Number 3

Of course, that which resists translation between cultures, even in the intimacy of protracted interaction, must also claim our attention--I shall return to this. By 1910, however, with the Act of Union, South Africa's "symbolic struggle" had produced a colonial state that, as the Comaroffs put it, was both "an institutional order of political regulation and a condition of being, a structure and a predicament" (E, p. 236). The structure and predicament were to harden from 1961, when the union became a republic under the National Party. That event, which signalled in its time the complete ascendancy of the Afrikaner and which led to the withdrawal of South Africa from the British Commonwealth, enabled a kind of amnesia in the heirs of the British settlement in South Africa. English-speaking South Africans--as the local heirs of Englishness--together with many of their cousins in the postcolonial anglophone world, became reluctant to acknowledge their historical responsibility for bringing about that state. Among historians currently writing about the Eastern Cape region, however, a developing consensus holds that it was in the years 1820-1857--from the arrival of the first British settlers to the year of the millenarian Cattle-Killing movement, which finally broke the power of the Xhosa chiefs--that the legal, administrative, and even epistemological basis for "the settled system" (to use Solomon Plaatje's phrase) was first laid down.6 By the mid-nineteenth century, the "new order" in the Cape Colony entailed a shift from a patriarchal mode of authority vested in the person of the Dutch pastoralist to a diffused, administrative form of power that limited the authority of the chiefs, redefined prevailing conditions of movement and labor for Africans, and consolidated a discursive regime based on the otherness of the native.7 The systemic quality of these developments leads one to conclude that at least part of the contemporary search for the roots of apartheid must be conducted in the effects of the British settlement. The "stabilizing presence" of the 1820 settlers was to make use of civilized "'free labour'" rather than slavery, but the settlers' prosperity came increasingly to depend on other forms of coercion. As Martin Legassick puts it, "the basis of 'civilisation'--the aspiration of the Enlightenment--lay in the practice of 'barbarism.'"8

Under these conditions the English language assumed the position it holds today, of being what J. M. Coetzee aptly calls "a deeply entrenched foreign language."9 The entrenchment of English beyond its usage by the settlers themselves was initially the responsibility of the missionaries, who undertook a "vast 'literacy' project" in both English and the indigenous languages, creating phonetic orthographies to record what they could grasp of the oral languages.10 In the field of textuality, the missionary enterprise was hugely consequential, for, as Leon de Kock has demonstrated, the ethos and representational forms of mission literacy defined the terms on which a black South African written literature was to emerge. The missions also governed access to African social and cultural empowerment: "Africans aspiring to social elevation in colonial society," says de Kock, "had little choice but to embrace the Protestant values embedded in the exalted medium of English which was promoted in missionary education" ("CB," p. 56). Indeed, a constricting Victorian ethos thereafter became the sine qua non of African self-expression among the educated intelligentsia until at least the 1940s. Inevitably, the entrenchment of English--the language, its ethos, its genres--was marked by the same functional ambivalence that was evident in the legacy of British settlement itself.

But these constraints--as Homi Bhabha might remark--also represented new grounds of opportunity. It is commonplace nowadays to observe that the ideals associated with evangelical liberalism were in some respects fraudulent in the colonies, with the cross becoming indistinguishable from the flag. And there is an inescapable truth in the argument, first made in the South African context by Dora Taylor in the 1950s, that the missionaries were in some respects harbingers of imperialism.11 But this perception, for all its obvious validity, also tends to obscure the consequentiality of missionary institutions and missionary discourse in the history of African nationalism. Some of the questions that beg asking are the following: How are the ideals associated with evangelical liberalism taken up and acted upon by those who fall under their influence? And then, What is the nature of this transaction, under what conditions is it effected, and what are its results?

Soga shared the missionary ethos almost as deeply as any child of a white missionary family. If we unravel some of the relevant events from a tangled archival record, we shall see that in Soga's case the adoption of missionary discourse in the English language would entail the transculturation and transvaluation of the aims and instruments of the civilizing mission. We should remember that the civilizing mission was, among other things, the historical form of the Enlightenment in the colonies; that is to say, for people like Soga--and indeed for the succeeding few generations of nationalist intellectuals--the principle of human perfectibility projected through the missionary enterprise represented the ground on which personal and social emancipation would be sought. The forms of emancipation that could be envisaged under such conditions would have to be salvaged from the economic and political instrumentalism that drove European imperialism and racism, and pressed into the service of all humanity. Such was their generational destiny, as Fanon might have put it. In their introduction to Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman remind us that among its many attributes and functions, enlightenment becomes, under certain conditions, a mode of resistance. If it has become commonplace to denounce the imperious Enlightenment, what do we make of those many figures in the history of African nationalism (this story might be repeated elsewhere) who, as Williams and Chrisman put it,

were engaged both in instrumentalising and immanently critiquing Enlightenment cultural forms (novels, newspapers, historiography, ethnography), political forms (parliamentary petitions, delegations), ethical and political emancipatory values (universal human equality, enfranchisement, self-government) in ways which require much critical attention today[?]12

6. See Solomon T. Plaatje, Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago (1930; London, 1984). The Cattle Killing was a thaumaturgical movement among the Xhosa who sought supernatural aid to remove British rule by means of the destruction of their own crops and livestock.

7. See Clifton C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 92-95. The historiographic implications of this view are spelled out by Martin Legassick in a review essay of Crais's The Making of the Colonial Order and No'l Mostert's Frontiers. See Martin Legassick, "The State, Racism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony," South African Historical Journal, no. 28 (May 1993): 329-68; "CB," p. 100n, following Legassick; and Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 1993). Legassick speaks of a "fresh synthesis" in which the emphasis in the inquiry into the foundations of apartheid shifts from Afrikaners to British settlers and the Cape Colony (Legassick, "The State, Racism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony," p. 332). Crais, whose exposition is most explicit, argues that while the British settlement projected a culture of civilized, manorial benevolence based on white "'free labour,'" the scheme failed partly because of harsh agricultural conditions and partly because of conflict among settlers themselves (ibid., p. 333). This produced a new crisis that directly threatened the Xhosa: whereas the scheme had proposed a relationship of civil detachment with the Xhosa, or at best their absorption into a modernizing economy, the failure of settlement made subjugation a more attractive proposition as a means of securing black labor and thereby extending pastoral agriculture (increasingly and predominantly through sheep farming). The shortage of labor and traditional patterns of resistance were finally dealt with in the aftermath of the Cattle Killing of 1856-1857, but even before that a fairly tight weave of administrative measures was already in place: the Masters and Servants Ordinance, the vagrancy laws, and the "D'Urban system" of control over settlement patterns, all of which were reinforced by a narrow ethnographic code relating to the character of "the Kafir."

8. Legassick, "The State, Racism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony," p. 334. See Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa, p. 95.

9. J. M. Coetzee, "Homage," Threepenny Review (Spring 1993): 7.

10. Michael Chapman, "Red People and School People from Ntsikana to Mandela: The Significance of 'Xhosa Literature' in a General History of South African Literature," English Academy Review 10 (1993): 36.

11. Taylor was a white member of the workers' Unity Movement; she wrote The Rôle of the Missionaries in Conquest under the pseudonym Nosipho Majeke. See Nosipho Majeke [Dora Taylor], The Rôle of the Missionaries in Conquest (1952; Cumberwood, 1986), and James R. Cochrane, Servants of Power: The Role of English-Speaking Churches in South Africa, 1903Ü1930, (Johannesburg, 1987).

12. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, "Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: An Introduction," in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Williams and Chrisman (New York, 1994), p. 15.

David Attwell is professor of English at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. He is the author of J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993) and the editor of Coetzee's Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992). He is currently working on a study of the cultural history of early black South African literature.