The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa

The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa. By Richard Elphick. Reconsiderations in Southern African History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 437; map, tables, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth, $40.00 E-book.What would happen if you took the theme of religion and probed its impact on the history of racial discourse, racism, and race relations in South Africa? The result would be Richard Elphick's long-awaited and magisterial, The Equality of Believers. From the role of liberalism, nationalism, Christian universalism and humanism, and the emergence of independent African churches to the contours of segregation, industrialization, and apartheid, Elphick uses the theme of religion to revisit some of the major questions that have preoccupied historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. The book is divided into three parts, spanning eighteen chapters. The early chapters sketch broadly the protagonists and antagonists of pioneer evangelism, the cultural chauvinism of European missionaries, and the pressures of indigenization. Black and white interlocutors queried whether spiritual and social equality were indeed axiomatic. Afrikaners voted with their feet and issued deafening refutations of gelykstelling (equalization of races), yet even among those missionaries who answered a resounding "yes," few were ready to relinquish their paternalistic roles. Part two investigates the fusing of the lexicon of gelykstelling with the "Social Gospel," the "Native Question" and segregation, developments that signaled how secularization would come to influence racial and evangelical discourses. The tum-of-the-century and interwar periods witnessed new alliances between secular and missionary organizations and reinforced missionary roles in shaping the discourse on settler colonialism, empire, and missions.The final section shows how a sometimes vague, but malleable notion of segregation gave way to assaults on the Cape franchise and on African education inter alia, and led to a more clearly delineated and concrete plan to implement apartheid It cannot be overstated that the history of race relations in South Africa is neither synonymous with nor a prelude to the inexorable march to apartheid after 1948. The Equality of Believers thus provides a welcome reconsideration of the relationship between Afrikaner nationalism, Calvinism, neo-Calvinism, the missiology of the Dutch Reformed Church, and apartheid ideology. Elphick engages in a nuanced analysis of the divergent views that hounded liberal interpretations out of the DRC establishment as it evolved into a volkskerk, underwent the paroxysms of Afrikaner nationalism, and retooled segregation ideology (pp. 3, 50). The verdict is a stinging indictment of liberals who failed to come up with a robust vision for multiracial South Africa, or at least one that could counter the "strenuous" intellectual work of apartheid ideologues who blended history, neo-Calvinism, biblical exegesis, and fear to win over their supporters (pp. 256, 264, 272).Blending English, Afrikaans, (and German) sources and historiographies, Elphick thus makes a persuasive case for using religion as an analytical framework to elucidate larger questions about the relationship between missions and empire, and religion and apartheid; especially in relation to the more materialist concerns of recent historians. He shows that in South Africa's long colonial past, in its systemic history of socioeconomic discrimination, and in the rise of African and Afrikaner nationalism, religion, whether framed as exclusive covenant theology, as missions, or as the Social Gospel, had important discursive and material contributions to make. Take for example these three key debates: the first about "native" agency/ "native churches and white paternalism; the second, a row about whether a classical versus industrial education was more suitable for Africans; and third, the deliberations about whether and how Christianity should address societal ills. …