A History of Christian Missions in South Africa by J. Du Plessis; The Basutos by E. CasalisReview by: Arthur Keppel-JonesCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 2, No. 1(Spring, 1968), pp. 111-114Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/484006 .

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THE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES

perversion and abuse." (P. 17.) He concludes that the African governments "ought to be constitutional, but cannot be." (P. 33.)

This is followed by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod on "Nationalism in a New Perspective: The African Case," an essay that seeks to prove the obvious by differentiating African nationalism from either the European or the Asian model. The next essay, by Claude E. Welch, Jr., attempts to compare Meiji Japan with contemporary Africa. It is wildly a-historical in its approach. and written at a level of critical thought appropriate to a rather mediocre graduate-school term paper.

Ali A. Mazrui's paper on "Borrowed Theory and Original Practice in African Politics" provides somewhat more substance, but it suffers from the author's hesitation to pursue his insights to their logical conclusion. Finally, the editor himself attempts to sum up, in an essay entitled simply "Repetition or Innovation?" His final two sentences deserve quotation in full:

Through politics, as the uniquely and supremely human activity, Africans are developing and expanding their awareness of the desirable and the realizable. What has been going on in Africa is therefore not as much repetition or innovation, as it is a revival of the pure classic tradition of Western philosophy, according to which politics is the master science.

If such balderdash is representative of the contribution that political science can make to our understanding of Africa's recent experience, I am afraid there is little hope for the discipline. But where does the blame really belong? On the collective authorship of this non-book? On the publisher who inflicts it on the book-buying public? Or on the academic system ("publish or perish") which serves to promote such perishable publications?

Martin D. Lewis Sir George Williams University

A History of Christian Missions in South Africa. By J. Du Plessis. Cape Town: Struik, 1965. (Facsimile Reprint 1911 Edition).

The Basutos. By E. Casalis. Cape Town: Struik, 1965. (Facsimile Reprint, 1861 edition).

These are two more reprints, by the enterprising firm of Struik, of old books long out of print. They are not to be measured by the same yardstick: The Basu- tos is primary material, the History of Christian Missions is secondary, a com- pilation.

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LE JOURNAL CANADIEN DES ETUDES AFRICAINES

It is a pity that Professor Gerdener, in his introduction to the History, went so far as to say that "of the limited number of classics in our country, which deserve a reproduction," this book "ranks among the first." This was to ask of the book more than it can give; much more, I think, than the author would have wanted to claim for his work. To place it in the first rank of South African classics is to invite a harsher criticism than the book deserves.

Professor Du Plessis was best known, a generation ago, for the integrity and the courage which made him the victim of a famous "heresy" trial. After that, harsh criticism does not come easily to the reviewer.

The book must be judged as a history, based on printed sources of the whole Christian missionary effort south of the Zambezi up to the year 1910. As such it was, and still is, indispensable to the reader who wants a general survey of that subject in one volume. Some of the sources used are still easily accessible, but many are not. This is true of the second half of the nineteenth century, which Du Plessis treats cursorily, as well as of the first half, of which he writes in detail.

The standard of scholarship does not pass muster as easily in 1968 as it would have done in 1911. There is very little generalization or explanation. Various groups of pious men, at different times, met together and decided to promote missionary work. They sent men to Africa; some of these were more successful than others in winning souls. Why? Does the explanation lie in dif- ferences among the missionaries, among the potential proselytes, or in the changing political and other circumstances of times and places? While much must necessarily be left to the Spirit's blowing where it listeth, some analysis is possible. Du Plessis gives us a chronicle, with only an occasional clue to the answers to these and other questions.

We are told something, but not enough, of the differences among the churches and societies in their aims and methods, and in their consequent achievements. Du Plessis strives to be fair, though the reader can detect a partiality for those kinds of churchmanship that most closely resemble the author's. In an appendix he gives some statistics which are admitted to be only approximate. For what they are worth, they show much larger numbers of adherents to some churches which have been treated briefly, and with a note of condescension in the book, than to some others which have figured promi- nently in the story. This paradox remains unresolved.

Important quotations are not always traceable by footnotes; a list of sources is appended to the chapter as a whole.

A certain amount of general political history had, of course, to be supplied as background. That this turns out to be history a la Theal can hardly be a ground for complaint. It was all they had in 1910; yet the reader of 1968 must be cautioned against it - against such notorious errors as Maynier's quartering

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THE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES

Hottentot troops in the church at Graaff-Reinet, and distortions in the history of Bantu and Boer migrations. It was natural, and perhaps accurate, to write in 1910 that "no responsible missionary to-day would venture to preach or to practise the doctrine of social equality between the white and the coloured races" (p. 128); but Du Plessis appears to have missed the significance of this statement when he comes (on pp. 453-9) to discuss, with some pain and dis- approval, the Ethiopian secessions from the mission churches.

The most important omission appears (or fails to appear) on pp. 290-2. There we are told that the Dutch Reformed Synod of 1857 marked an advance in the mission field at home and abroad, and that the Synod of 1880 placed the crown on this work by allowing the mission churches to set up their own independent Synod. What is omitted by Du Plessis can be found in Ben Marais, Die Kleur-Krisis en die Weste, by a curious coincidence also on pp. 290-1. The Synod of 1857, with reluctance and embarrassment, made a concession to contemporary prejudice by permitting the establishment of separate congrega- tions for "the (former) Heathens." By 1880 this church apartheid had developed so far that the "heathens" were separated from the Synod itself and made into an independent church. These were the steps which enabled the Dutch Reformed Church in our own time to become "the Nationalist Party of Prayer". Their real significance is not revealed by Du Plessis.

Such distortions would be damning in a modern book. They are not damning in this one, because allowance must be made for the intellectual climate of 1910. It is probable that Du Plessis himself missed the point, because the progress of segregation would have seemed in his time to be a part of the natural order of things. For all his faults, he put together a readable book which provides the basic factual material of his subject.

One of Du Plessis' sources was The Basutos, or Twenty-three Years in South Africa, by E. Casalis, published in 1861 and now reprinted. The twenty- three years began in 1833, when the Paris Evangelical Mission reached Basu- toland. This was virtually the first contact of the Basuto with Europeans, for the Great Trek had not yet begun, and it has been for the Basuto an almost unmixed blessing from that day to this.

Casalis has much to say of his own and his colleagues' experiences, and more of the manners and customs of the people. He began to observe them before they had come under any European influence. He was an acute, scholarly and sympathetic observer. Unlike many of his fellow-missionaries he did not write off pagan customs or beliefs as mere idols to be smashed and forgotten: "For my own part, I cannot help feeling a certain respect for these traditions, incomplete and barbarous as they may be. I see in them a dyke resisting the invasion of absolute materialism, and therefore an element of success which God has in His wisdom reserved for His word."

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A fundamentalist of course - his tour of duty was over before The Origin of Species appeared - he often turned to the Pentateuch for the ultimate explanation of Basuto customs and origins, as he did also for ammunition in the work of conversion ("You see this sun, which will soon be six thousand years old...."). He knew his Bible, and the classical languages too; but what he wrote about Africa and Africans was based strictly on his own observations, or, at the furthest, those of his immediate colleagues. He did not venture upon explanations of colonial history or politics or other matters outside his expe- rience.

The conventional piety of the time has a ring of sincerity as he writes it, the more so because a gentle sense of humour enlivens his style and illuminates his personality. His generalizations are often illustrated and fortified by parti- cular examples: conversations, personal incidents, brief character sketches. He is aware, too, of the dangers of facile generalization, and often mentions the exceptions that may or may not prove the rule.

I am not qualified to appraise the details of custom and belief as Casalis describes them, and can say only that I found nothing in his account that I suspected to be inaccurate. He was not a professional social anthropologist, he could not relate the case of the Basuto to a wider background (apart from the frequent references back to the Old Testament), and he seldom succeeded in explaining a custom by tracing its roots deep into the soil of the society, as others have done since his time. The special r6le of the maternal uncle in relation to his nephew is an example of this. Yet this amateurishness, when practised by so honest an observer, is one of the virtues of the book. Casalis had no case to prove or theory to bolster. He described what he saw, and what no later observer would be able to see under the same conditions.

Of the two books, this one is the classic.

Arthur Keppel-Jones, Queen's University

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