| Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff | The American Historical Review, 108.2

Review Essays

Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff

ELIZABETH ELBOURNE

"In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us," as the first chapter of the Book of John proclaims in a text often read at Christian Easter celebrations. The text might be taken as a something of a leitmotif of the first two volumes (of a projected three) of Jean and John Comaroff's brilliant and rightly influential series, Of Revelation and Revolution.¹ The first two volumes, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa and The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, explore the nineteenth-century encounter between British Protestant Nonconformist missionaries and the southern Tswana in a region that is now in the northern part of the Republic of South Africa. The Comaroffs attempt, however, to do far more than merely describe a series of relatively small-scale historical events. They are interested in missionaries above all because of their complex relationship to "modernity," which the Comaroffs see in turn as tightly linked to a particular phase of European colonialism. The title of the second volume, "The Dialectics of Modernity," suggests as much. Most European missionaries tried hard to function as agents of cultural change—of "civilization" in early nineteenth-century missionaries' own terms, implicitly casting the Tswana as "savage" and thereby laying out one of the key dialectical oppositions of colonialism, which would function as a justification for dispossession. Some Tswana interlocutors adapted some elements of "Christian behavior," the Comaroffs argue, but many others demonstrated resistance to the hegemony of British colonialism in part by resisting the colonization of their everyday lives. The nineteenth-century Protestant project to remake the world, of which the Nonconformist missionaries of southern Africa were important proponents, is thus linked by the Comaroffs forward to colonialism and to contemporary globalization, and backward in time to the emergence of capitalism. Missionaries were, in effect, agents of a first wave of globalization. The missionary movement was an early exemplar of a transnational global movement, while the intellectual claims of missionaries to universality paralleled the modernist claims of a globalizing colonialism. The struggles over the texture and composition of everyday life that took place on the frontiers of colonial society in nineteenth-century southern Africa therefore tell us something not only about the nature of colonialism but also about modernity and its considerable discontents, as well as about the resistance of the colonized to the European colonial project.

In this sense, a quest for origins informs the narrative structure of both books.² Indeed, one of the reasons that this seminal text engages us so closely is its concern with the narrative of dispossession and resistance, with a beginning and therefore, implicitly, some hope for an end—an only ambivalently postmodern narrative, in fact, despite some alarm in southern Africanist circles over Of Revelation and Revolution as a postmodern nail in the coffin of materialist history.³ This focus lends moral urgency to the Comaroffs' consideration of the distant initial encounters between white missionaries and the southern Tswana in the early nineteenth century. Volume 2, for example, opens with a striking vignette: Tswana soldiers refuse to defend the white regime in 1994, as Afrikaner patriots launch a last-ditch raid on Bophuthatswana. As homeland structures crumble around them as they write, the Comaroffs acknowledge that endings and beginnings are never entirely neat. "And yet in many respects, the narrative of Tswana colonization had completed itself, finally running its course from Revelation to Revolution."⁴ Doubtless the authors would now adopt a less utopian position, but their enthusiasm for revolution and for endings is important, and typical of South African historical writing from the decades before the end of apartheid.⁵

In a similar vein, at the heart of Volume 1 is a crucial chapter, "Through the Looking Glass: Heroic Journeys, First Encounters." This chapter sets out to explore "the initial meeting of two worlds, one imperial and expansive, the other local and defensive."⁶ In marvelously evocative detail, the authors describe the initial entry of envoys of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1816 into the Tswana capital, Dithakong (seen by the missionaries themselves as a sacred journey into the land of Satan), a subsequent meeting, and the complex negotiations that took place throughout over the terms of the mission. A key metaphor is furnished by the mirror that the LMS envoy John Campbell presented as a gift to the Tswana chief, Mothibi, symbolizing the Western effort to reconfigure Tswana consciousness and the Tswana notion of the self. These initial encounters prefigured the colonial encounter to come: "the square enclosure and all that 'took place' at the center of the most public of Tswana spaces was ominous, foreshadowing a methodical reconstruction of their symbolic map."⁷ The Christian missionary project, this chapter further suggests, was from the start central to the creation of the dialectical oppositions of colonialism, ironic in view of its claim to erase difference.

For the Comaroffs, the colonization of the Tswana thus began (although it certainly did not end) with the word, in the sense both of Bible and of cultural text, with the advent of white Protestant missionaries and their claims to possess the revealed divine word—albeit a word made flesh, clothed in material power. The roots of colonization were in a series of knowledge claims and a set of hegemonic cultural discourses, which would bolster the later seizure of land and of labor. Many scholars have explored the linkage between knowledge claims and colonial power, an issue that has long lain at the heart of postcolonial scholarship and that occupies an increasingly central place in the study of imperialism from a diversity of perspectives.⁸ Nonetheless, Of Revelation and Revolution furnishes a particularly influential and important statement of the position, in part because it provides a great deal of flesh on the bones of a theoretical model of cultural colonialism. The work moves from the field of discourse alone to examine in great detail concrete material struggles over the remaking of everyday life, including Tswana efforts to resist cultural colonialism. More controversially, perhaps, Of Revelation and Revolution also attempts to make explicit the links in southern Africa between political, economic, and cultural colonialism—fields the authors argue are in any case impossible to disaggregate.⁹

The programmatic claims that lend Of Revelation and Revolution its force also, however, cause some interesting tensions in the book. The need to make linkages and the Comaroffs' explicit commitment to the exploration of large-scale processes lead the authors to oversimplify in places. Not only that, but the imperatives of a dialectical method push the Comaroffs at times (despite their parallel stress on indeterminacy and their very explicit engagement with the costs and benefits of a dialectical analysis, especially in Volume 2) into tighter methodological corners than they might themselves like. The links between early nineteenth-century cultural colonialism and late nineteenth-century political colonialism are not as direct or as ontologically indissoluble as the Comaroffs assume they are, while the relationship of "modernity" to colonialism furnishes matter for debate, with considerable contemporary implications. The very boldness of the Comaroffs' arguments has indeed contributed to a mixed reception among scholars of southern African history and of religion in Africa, with some enthusiastically welcoming the methodological innovation of the Comaroffs and others casting doubt in a number of ways. In the second volume of the series, the Comaroffs seem to me to have backed down somewhat from some of their bolder claims, despite their spirited engagement with the critics. This in itself provides an interesting case study of the evolution of ideas during a turbulent decade in South African history.

In what follows, I would like to engage with this important work in several ways. First, I want to lay out my understanding of the theoretical guidelines in the opening volume, with particular attention to the issue of hegemony and power. Second, I want to provide an alternate reading of the opening encounters between Tswana and missionary, focusing on other intermediaries and on the fact that, even before the advent of European missionaries, the region was already affected by colonialism. I shall use this example to ask whether a dialectic model does not in some ways oversimplify complicated situations and make it hard to account for fudging across the fault lines. I shall further ask whether the result is not a rather muted account of individual agency and an attenuated depiction of the multiple uses of mission Christianity, both as language and as practice. This is not, however, to deny the latent authoritarian potential of much missionary activity, particularly in a colonial context. Third, I also want to gesture, albeit sketchily, toward some issues associated with narrative and chronology, suggesting that the schematic narrative about "modernity," industrialization, and globalization that undergirds both volumes, though provocative and important, also offers a number of hostages to fortune. These include an undue stress on the capacity of missionaries to induct converts into the global economy by changing their consciousness; rather, I see converts struggling to adapt to an overpowering global economy, among other things by trying to use Christianity in a variety of ways, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Having said all that, does this fact-mongering matter?—What are the Comaroffs doing that might go beyond reading the content of particular archives? Throughout, I want to take up some concerns of African historians and anthropologists with questions of narrative, voice, and agency in Of Revelation and Revolution.

The initial chapter of the first volume is a careful theoretical exposition. Although the authors rather cheerfully direct those with little stomach for theoretical discussions to skip theirs and, en bon bricoleur, to pick up the narrative at a later point, the opening discussion of anthropological concepts is in fact crucial for an understanding of what both this book and its later companion seek to accomplish. I would accordingly like to pause upon it. The stated goal of the work is to present an anthropology of the "colonial encounter," in this case between British Nonconformist missionaries and the southern Tswana, with the larger implication that the missionaries acted as the cultural arm of colonialism, while the dilemmas of the Tswana in their confrontations with colonialism mirrored, if they obviously did not precisely reproduce, the experience of other colonized African groups in South Africa. The Comaroffs state that they hope that their discussion of this particular mission will accomplish three other things: to anticipate later modes of consciousness and struggle in South Africa; to look at an example of historical processes that were happening across Africa and indeed much of the non-Western world; and to examine analytic issues to do with the "nature of power and resistance." With reference to this latter objective:

How, precisely, were structures of inequality fashioned during the colonial encounter, often in the absence of more conventional, more coercive tools of domination? How was consciousness made and remade in this process? ... How were new hegemonies established and the "ground prepared," in [Antonio] Gramsci's phrase, for formal European political control? ... Even more fundamentally, how are we to understand the dialectics of culture and power, ideology and consciousness that shape such historical processes?¹⁰

From the vantage point of 1991, the Comaroffs placed their project into a historiographical framework that has since changed considerably, in no small part due to their own work.¹¹ At the time, the Comaroffs castigated anthropologists for neglecting both the study of colonialism and, more broadly, history itself. Historians paid more attention to missions but in the 1960s and 1970s often focused on the theoretically crude question of "whose side were the missionaries really on?" By the 1980s, mission history had been more fruitfully incorporated into work on such long-term processes as colonial conquest, capitalist expansion, state formation, and proletarianization. The methodological innovation of the Comaroffs in the early 1990s was, however, to underscore how much this new approach was itself limited by its "preoccupation with political economy at the expense of culture, symbolism, and ideology."¹² They echoed the 1986 claim of Terence Ranger that most of the historiography of early missions to that point had overestimated the political and economic factors in its expansion—in a manner, according to the Comaroffs, stemming ultimately from oppositions between mind and matter at the ontological roots of our social thought.¹³ In rejecting a narrowly political-economic approach, the authors believed they could better answer the questions of why it was that missionaries succeeded in effecting broad social, political, and economic changes without substantial material resources (a question that, of course, assumes that this was accomplished by missionaries). What was needed, the Comaroffs claimed, was a study of consciousness: of why people articulated belief in certain things, why they took others for granted, how colonialism and consciousness were inextricably intertwined. It is in this sense that missionaries were most clearly colonial agents: they sought to remake the lifeworld of the Tswana, indeed, to colonize their consciousness. They did not necessarily seek directly and simplistically to incorporate the Tswana into an unequal colonial world: they had dreamed instead of a "global democracy of material well-being and moral merit," in the Comaroffs' phrase.¹⁴ Nonetheless, their actions contributed to building an empire of inequality. This claim rests on the additional argument that the missionaries were the products of post-Enlightenment modernity, creations and agents of rationalization in the Weberian sense. Similarly, Tswana interlocutors made a variety of unexpected uses of the evangelical message, and of evangelical attempts to remake their world, again with unpredictable results. In sum, the encounter between colonial evangelism and the southern Tswana can best be described as a "long conversation," a continuing process in the course of which "signifiers were set afloat, fought over, and recaptured on both sides of the colonial encounter."¹⁵ Over the course of this conversation, the Tswana came to conceive of themselves as constituting a separate, reified entity, with a set of "Tswana" customs, or setswana. At the same time, the "forms" of the "European worldview" became inscribed on the "African landscape": "not only did colonialism produce reified cultural orders, it gave rise to a new hegemony amidst—and despite—cultural contestation."¹⁶

Throughout this discussion, the Comaroffs reject the poststructuralist claim that all meanings are equally tenuous and open to contestation, regretting the epistemological hypochondria and consequent intellectual immobility to which postmodern critiques have given rise in academia—even as the authors uphold some of the central insights of such critiques, notably their insistence that the indeterminacies of meaning and action be addressed by scholars.¹⁷ What poststructuralists cannot address is the basic question of how some meanings get widely accepted over significant periods of time by those against whose interest it is to believe them. This is the problem of hegemony, raised by Gramsci (however sketchy his discussion in the Prison Notebooks) and developed by many social theorists.¹⁸ The Comaroffs offer a solution, though over-schematic in the literal sense of the word. They see human consciousness as existing on a spectrum from "hegemony" to "ideology." At the hegemony end of the spectrum, one finds the taken-for-granted inscribed in everyday life—those beliefs that are not questioned because they are not even noticed as beliefs. At the other end, one finds articulated ideology, which is available for debate and which often tries to bring into consciousness the hegemonic beliefs of earlier stages. Culture in general is the "space of signifying practice, the semantic ground on which human beings seek to construct and represent themselves and others—and hence, society and history."¹⁹ Somewhat oddly, hegemonic concepts are described as "constructs and conventions that have come to be shared and naturalized through a political community," while ideology is "the expression and ultimately the possession of a particular social group, although it may be widely peddled beyond."²⁰ This psychological structure seems artificial and unwieldy; it is unclear why the province of the hegemonic idea should be the political community (a tricky concept to define in any case), while ideology is described not only as the product of communities (rather than at least sometimes of individuals) but as the province of the social rather than, say, political or even self-consciously intellectual groupings. The definition of the political is murky here, as it is throughout the book, despite (even sometimes because of) the painstaking effort of the authors to demonstrate the deeply political nature of the everyday stuff of life; what is lacking here and elsewhere is a willingness to limit and define the nature of the political in such a manner as to make it meaningful to call something political in the first place.

Be that as it may, this construction of group political psychology permits the Comaroffs to draw conclusions that are critically important for their overall project. Indeed, the reconstruction of struggles over the stuff of everyday life that takes pride of place in the second volume depends ultimately on this theoretical structure. Given the place of hegemony and ideology on an ever-changing spectrum, the two are constantly fluid; meanings are always being made and remade, as ideology challenges hegemony to reveal itself, and it is in the inchoate, fluid space between hegemony and ideology that human consciousness is at its most creative. Given that hegemony is constructed largely through the "assertion of control over various modes of symbolic production: over such things as educational and ritual processes, patterns of socialization, political and legal procedures, canons of style and self-representation, public communication, health and bodily discipline and so on," the realm of "symbolic production" is (presumably) political because it is a site for power struggles. This means both that the "symbolic production" is political and that resistance to modes of symbolic production that generate hegemony is political. Modes of resistance run across as wide a spectrum as modes of control, with at one end organized protest and other movements readily recognized as political by the West; at the other end are "gestures of tacit refusal and iconoclasms, gestures that sullenly and silently contest the forms of an existing hegemony."²¹

It is thus in this light that missions must be seen. They sought to extend hegemonic control over indigenous peoples by changing their worldviews to a point that new ways of behaving and seeing the world were completely internalized. Resistance to the specific forms of Christianity was also resistance to the message behind the signs. In the purest sense, resistance to Christian forms was resistance to the content of capitalism and to the global capitalist system; this is indeed a critical plank of Jean Comaroff's fascinating (if not uncontroversial) reading of African independent churches as quintessentially subversive because they appropriated and yet subverted Christian forms, in her important 1985 study Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance.²² Christian missions must also be re-read. Their gestures and ritual must be analyzed in order to see how missionaries were attempting to change far more than religious allegiance, acting as emissaries of modernity and economic transformation. Finally, conversion was inextricably political, and as such a suitable site for political competition between colonizers and the colonized. The extremely rich remainder of this book and its successor volume work out the implications of these theoretical positions through a quite brilliant analysis of the nineteenth-century "colonial exchange" between the southern Tswana and the Nonconformist missions to them run first by the London Missionary Society (pioneers in the field) and then by their later-arriving brethren, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society.

An additional important project of the authors throughout this study is to demonstrate the importance of an imagined Africa to the British sense of themselves and more broadly to the construction of modernity. As the Comaroffs argue in Volume 2, as part of a series of seven propositions about colonialism, "colonialism was as much involved in making the metropole, and the identities and ideologies of colonizers, as it was in (re)making peripheries and colonial subjects."²³ In particular, in developing the theme of Africa as a "negative trope in the language of modernity" in Volume 1, the Comaroffs were among the most influential of scholars to introduce into the history of missionary activity in South Africa the postcolonialist concern with the construction of the colonial or minority "other" as a means for self-construction on the part of the person doing the defining.²⁴ Despite their influence on many literary scholars, in Volume 2 the Comaroffs ironically confess themselves "uneasy with most literary critical approaches to colonialism," eschew a vulgar Hegelian approach, and stress that they prefer to focus on "selves" and "others" in the plural; we shall return to this issue. A final critical point is that the authors see the interaction between missionary and Tswana as a form of dialectic between two key groups of interlocutors, dependent on the notion of difference. In the second volume, the Comaroffs acknowledge with more force than in Volume 1 the existence of overlap on the ground, and they reemphasize that the idea of difference was created by the dialectical process, despite some merging of lifeways on the ground and the mutual influence of Tswana and British. Note their comment that "neither 'the colonizer' nor 'the colonized' represented an undifferentiated sociological or political reality, save in exceptional circumstances."²⁵ Since the end product of the colonial encounter was so clearly the production of difference and a series of deeply embedded dialectical oppositions, the Comaroffs nonetheless argue that this is the most productive optic through which to view the early nineteenth-century encounter between European missionaries and Africans. This model is furthermore essential to their theoretical account of the formation of hegemony.

One of the things I have found most perplexing about the work of the Comaroffs is, nevertheless, the question of the extent to which it is appropriate to describe the Tswana encounter with Christianity as a form of dialectic. This question implies the ancillary question of who the agents of the dialectic were at given moments. On the face of it, these are tendentious concerns, since colonialism was so clearly in many ways a dialectic between colonized and colonizer, just as colonialism clearly generated reified views of colonizer and colonized alike. Missionaries themselves usually understood their activities in dialectical terms. Yet I think one can ask whether a dialectical approach to the history of Christianity in colonial contexts does not fail to capture some aspects of social and political reality. This is above all because of the rapidity with which Christianity was out of the hands of the missionaries and settlers who brought it, the corresponding importance of non-Europeans in the spread of Christianity, the multiplicity of uses to which diverse interest groups of all ethnicities put Christianity as both a language and a practice, and the political and cultural complications of regions with multiple power players.

These issues are brought out by a re-reading of the opening encounters between missionaries and Tswana that occupy so key a role in the first volume of Of Revelation and Revolution. I should add that I made similar comments about the opening phases of the mission in an unpublished conference paper after the publication of Volume 1. The Comaroffs respond generously to this paper in Volume 2, as they do to a number of other critics, using the occasion to clarify and amplify their understanding of a dialectical approach. I do not want to beat a dead horse. Nonetheless, I think there are some useful differences of interpretation at stake, and so will abuse the Comaroffs' patience by briefly recapitulating a potential alternate reading of these opening gambits, before returning to the wider issue of different approaches to mission history.²⁶

Let me first make a comment about regional issues. The lands of the southern Tswana were disrupted by colonialism, drought, hunger, and regional conflict well before the formal advent of missions. Furthermore, as Johannes du Bruyn has underscored, the lands inhabited by the southern Tswana were so profoundly affected by the Cape Colony to the south that it is problematic to frame a discussion of cultural colonialism primarily in terms of Europe and the Transvaal. In particular, the colonial firearms frontier moved with great speed, was highly destructive, and was arguably more important earlier than the Comaroffs suggest. Many different armed bands, some of them ethnically mixed, decimated peaceful groups in conflict situations exacerbated by hunger.²⁷ Arguments about the regional context for evangelical missions to the Tswana are also implicit in a much wider body of literature about the so-called mfecane (or difaqane)—terms that have been much disputed by historians. Traditionally, the mfecane was a term given to the widespread wars, famines, and refugee movements that shook (and temporarily depopulated) much of the interior of southern Africa in the early nineteenth century, the impact of which on the Tswana the Comaroffs date from 1822. There is no space here to explore that debate, although it will be helpful to know that a critical issue is whether or not covert slave trading from the Cape Colony and Portuguese territories was at the root of disruptions that have more traditionally been ascribed to the many conquests of the Zulu kingdom in the region of what is now Natal. The point I want to emphasize here is not only the great disruption in the region but also the plausibility of historian Neil Parsons's argument that Tswana territory had already been subject since the seventeenth century to political unrest and the large-scale movement of populations. Parsons in fact suggests that the roots of disruption and state formation in the area may well lie in destabilization that considerably antedated the 1820s and may in turn be linked in at least some way to eighteenth-century slave trading to the north and the rise of the predatory Cape Colony to the south.²⁸ Scholars also tend to see later Afrikaner settler colonialism in the region as part of the same broad processes. All this calls into question the determinative impact of mission Christianity in an already destabilized region. Maybe political colonialism did precede cultural colonialism after all? How might we need to reconceptualize the Christian/Tswana encounter if we think of it as taking place in some sense in a frontier zone, or even a borderland, with multiple players, already characterized by cultural admixture, politically influenced uses of Christianity, and political turbulence? The Comaroffs are of course sensitive to these hugely important issues. I think nonetheless that they could emphasize regional complexity more and the power of missionary Christianity somewhat less in their discussion of the roots of material change (at both ends of the nineteenth century), as well as pay more attention to the implications for their overall theoretical argument of the fact that Africans tried to experiment in response to very difficult local conditions. It is also important that the missionaries entered as potential power brokers in a turbulent environment but were initially weak, able to manipulate power if and only if they could make the right alliances.

With these types of broad issues in mind, the opening encounters between missionaries and Tswana, so well described by the Comaroffs, might be re-read as conversations between a number of actors. Four LMS delegations traveled between 1813 and 1817 to the southern Tswana settlement known to the missionaries as Lattakoo (later Dithakong) to try to persuade the Tswana to accept missionaries. It is perhaps symbolically appropriate that none of these delegations was exclusively white. In addition to the delegations' African members, even the missionaries themselves included a black West Indian man and a Welsh speaker. Neither, come to that, was the Tswana polity entirely "Tswana." The Thlaping polity was relatively multi-ethnic; the chief Mothibi, for example, was half !Kora (a Khoekhoe-speaking group) and (like others of the chiefly lineage) married a !Kora woman. More significantly, the Europeans were not the only, or even the most important, players promoting an evangelical mission.

Key from a Tswana perspective were regional actors, the Griqua (as they eventually came to be known), some of whom acted as patrons of the early LMS mission to the Tswana. The Griqua were clusters of settlers in the region of Khoekhoe descent, some of whom had white fathers and Khoesan mothers, and many of whom had migrated from the Cape Colony, epitomizing the remaking of identity in the wake of colonialism. Groups spearheaded by Griqua had established regional hegemony through their access to arms and horses. They provided important trade links with the Cape Colony and were sources of trade goods for the Tswana. The Griqua were already using Christianity in a variety of complicated ways, as a token of equality with white settlers, as justification for what Robert Ross has termed "sub-imperialism" with regard to the unconverted Tswana, and indeed as a basis for their reconstituted polities. Alliances with missionaries gave these emergent polities potential access to diplomacy and markets, including the arms trade, in addition to spiritual concerns. Indeed, on the way to Mothibi's settlement, British LMS inspector Campbell had helped compose a formal written constitution for a Griqua group, reflecting the symbolic uses of the language of law. The language of Christianity was already on the loose in the interior, in other words, and subject to interpretation in Griqualand as much as in the seminaries of Europe.²⁹ The (Khoekhoe) !Kora had also been exposed to Christianity and were also competing by the 1820s to obtain guns and horses from the Cape Colony.

The decision of Mothibi and his counselors about whether to accept an LMS mission was thus complicated by the fact that the LMS came under the protection of the powerful Griqua Kok clan. During a second LMS delegation to the Tswana (overlooked by the Comaroffs), for example, Adam Kok presented newly arrived missionaries to Mothibi and acted as their translator. Mothibi was anxious not to offend the powerful Kok family, but worried because his own people had since turned against the mission. In fact, he eventually sent these missionaries away altogether. When two missionaries told Mothibi that one of them "wrought in wood, and one that was to come wrought in Iron, that we would do all the work for him in that way that he wanted," Mothibi was pleased and told Kok "he could not think of rejecting those that came with or through the medium of him." When the missionaries pursued the issue of teaching, however, Mothibi worriedly told Kok that "he would not be instructed, and if A. Kok should endeavour to press it sharply upon him, and his refusal cause a variance between them, he said that he would rather take the flight from Lattakoo, with people." Kok had to reassure Mothibi that the Griqua leader would not force the Tswana chief to relocate if the Thlaping refused missionaries.³⁰ Once the Kuruman mission had been established, it depended for its survival on Griqua military protection for many years.

If missionaries were initially dependent on Griqua intermediaries, they were also materially dependent for travel and translation on Khoesan hired in the colony. The Khoekhoe and San had long borne the brunt of brutal colonial subjugation and were in many cases more receptive to conversion than groups beyond the Cape Colony. The Comaroffs indeed have a wonderful discussion of the occlusion of such intermediary figures from missionary accounts of putatively solitary heroic journeys.³¹ I would go further than the Comaroffs, however, and suggest that at least some of these companions saw themselves as fellow missionaries. On the first delegation, Campbell was accompanied by a number of Khoesan Christians from the Cape. Their prayers and preaching had made a pilgrimage route of their journey through a country of which they saw themselves as taking spiritual possession. They were active in trying to persuade Tswana individuals to accept missionaries.³² In 1814, a synod of the southern African LMS missionaries had "set aside" in a religious ceremony several men of Khoesan descent to act as LMS agents in the interior, several of whom, including Griqua leader Andries Waterboer, subsequently played important roles in the politics of Transorangia. Cupido Kakkerlak, a product of Eastern Cape mission schools whose letters reveal a passionate spirituality, also itinerated in the region, attempting, albeit with little success, to evangelize among the !Kora. These men were employed by the LMS. As the Comaroffs point out, the society would devote much energy to reining in and controlling "native agents" after the earliest years of the mission. Nonetheless, evidence from the Cape suggests that there was also considerable evangelical activity by converts who were not formally paid by missionary societies, including elephant hunters such as Hendrik Boesak or long-range wagon drivers. In addition, as mission stations became more like churches and congregations fought for independence from missionary control around the mid-century mark, congregations had more authority, not less. My point is that evidence from elsewhere in southern Africa suggests that Christianity was spread by people with long-range contacts other than missionaries, presumably not necessarily in orthodox form. The centrality of Khoesan people (and later other Africans) to European-led missions to the Tswana suggests a wider oral evangelical culture that the written records would not completely reflect.³³

Be that as it may, the importance of Khoesan agents to the Tswana mission is most clearly exemplified by the fourth delegation to Lattakoo, led by a former carpenter from Essex, James Read, after Mothibi had finally capitulated. Read brought with him an unusually large group of people of varied ethnic origins, mostly Khoesan, including, more problematically, his own Khoekhoe wife, Elizabeth Valentyn, and his pregnant former mistress, a San woman, Sabina Pretorius, whom he claimed to have met by accident on the road. At least ten Khoesan men and six Khoesan women accompanied Read, all of whom were church members and some of whom were "zealous persons."³⁴ It is indeed possible that the Khoesan of the Cape Colony saw this as a Khoesan mission to the Tswana, brokered by their kin among the Griqua. In any case, once Robert Moffat took over the Lattakoo station in 1821 from Read (disgraced for his adultery), he would fight successfully to diminish the influence of the Khoesan group from the Cape Colony, whom he then firmly wrote out of the history of the station. He dismissed several for immorality, despite the resistance, in which women played prominent roles, of members of the group. Moffat also found himself opposed by Griqua factions, many of whom resented his power-mongering presence.³⁵

Before the late 1810s, the earliest LMS agents in southern Africa were not particularly good or even very enthusiastic apostles of capitalist cultural practices, mostly because they were so poor themselves and so looked-down-upon by many respectable members of colonial society. More than a few also tended to believe in dreams, to hear the personal voice of God, or to look for the imminent end of the world. Those missionaries who were closest in time to the Enlightenment, in sum, acted least like the bourgeois agents of respectability described by the Comaroffs as quintessential exemplars of the rationalizing project of modernity. The colonial unrespectability of early missionaries was compounded by the fact that perhaps a third of them married African women before 1817, while several were involved in sexual scandals. Others took high-profile political positions that were unpopular among settlers. The Comaroffs pick up the story as Moffat, in common with many of his fellows, was urgently trying to reclaim the moral high ground and to reinvent the mission as visibly respectable and as focused on "civilization." A lot of this is more about the internal history of the LMS than about African Christianity; we certainly in general need more of the latter and perhaps less of the former. Nonetheless, it argues for the importance of local detail, and for the centrality of fractures within as well as between groups. It also points forward to ways in which converts would later need to perform "civilization" and "respectability" in order to maneuver on the colonial stage, not solely because their consciousnesses had been colonized.

From the start, tensions among evangelicals themselves were fueled by anxiety over the rapid removal of Christianity from the control of white missionaries. This tension was arguably innate to a type of evangelical Christianity based on textual interpretation and the notion of divine inspiration, as well as being the product of Tswana reconstruction of Christian forms. Certainly, missionaries soon lost control even of "orthodox" Christianity. Among the northern Tswana, Paul Landau has brilliantly documented the use of Christianity by junior royals to challenge existing authority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in ways that escaped a series of rather peripheral white missionaries. Among the southern Tswana, Thlaping elites also exploited divisions among missionaries to their own political ends. In 1842, for example, Tswana elite men successfully appealed to LMS superintendent John Philip to fire missionary Holloway Helmore for excessive interference in congregational affairs, including deposing Mothibi's son as a deacon.³⁶ Missionaries to the Tswana experienced other humiliations. The coherent Tswana group targeted by the mission decamped, to be replaced by a more motley group of refugees. The mission was battered by raids from various groups, could not protect its members, and was not successful at all until it started picking up displaced persons in the 1830s.

A number of questions arise from this type of re-reading. At a macro level, the region was already turbulent and populations were mobile, so Christianity scarcely arrived as the harbinger of globalization in anything other than an ideological sense. This raises in turn the thorny and ultimately unanswerable question of whether Christianity would have had the capacity to colonize minds without the prior disruption of material conditions. We are back at the difficult issue of how determinative "culture" is by itself. Perhaps in the end, this rejigging of chronology strengthens the Comaroffs' fundamental argument about the inextricability of "culture" and material struggle. It does nonetheless pose all the more sharply the question of how Christianity—and religious innovation, more broadly defined—functioned in a frontier zone in a manner that was independent of the machinations of white missionaries.³⁷

Also at the "macro" level, the Tswana were not entirely "local," nor were they unused to cultural difference. In a multi-lingual, multi-religious environment, were missionaries really needed to contextualize "Tswana custom"? Missionary papers record Mothibi making distinctions between !Kora, Tswana, and colonial Khoekhoe customs, for example. I would not want to deny the importance of local identity, or to exaggerate the degree of long-range contacts of the southern Tswana, in contrast to the remarkable global reach and global identity claims of the early missionary movement. There are issues of tremendous importance raised by that contrast. But it also seems important that there were other regional interlocutors who were of greater material importance initially to the Tswana than the Europeans, and with whom they already had the kind of cultural interchanges that might have permitted the type of self-consciousness about "Tswana" identity that the Comaroffs see as the fruit of the "long conversation." This is also a way of asking about what the southern African interior looked like before formal European colonialism and whether the communities of the region were really as settled as they appeared. There are echoes here of an older debate about whether the encounter with the "macrocosmic" claims of the "world religions" Christianity and Islam shattered the "microcosm" of African localist religions, at a time when colonialism was shattering the microcosm of daily life. As Terence Ranger has argued, whatever the intellectual issues at stake, African societies, at least in the southern African interior, have to be recognized as also "macrocosmic" in the sense that they had long-range contacts, exchanged ideas over large swathes of territory (as the rapid spread of prophetic movements suggests), and rubbed up against a wide variety of different groups.³⁸ The relative mobility of different communities was also a factor in breaking down localism. This type of approach, to my mind, decenters the European missionary—at least until the missionary came backed up by a colonial economy and a colonial army.

The power exerted by the conditions of the "frontier zone" of the region is represented by the fact that even missionaries were compelled by material circumstances to take on features of African polities. The Comaroffs highlight the vision of Kuruman mission head and former gardener Robert Moffat, and his wife Mary, like that of many early nineteenth-century Nonconformist missionaries, as one of an unrealistic rural idyll, in which they sought to remake Africa in the image of a vanishing and imagined rural utopian Britain. One could, however, go further in considering the contradictions of Kuruman. Robert Moffat acted in many ways like an African leader as well as like a nostalgic Scot, and he needed to do so because of the material conditions of the frontier. In the 1820s, he proved unable to retain the allegiance of existing chiefs, for whom he was too clearly a competitor. As the refugee crisis accelerated, however, Moffat was able to gather together dispossessed people. The price of their admission was allegiance to the religion of the leader, since religion was used to rebuild communities. The currency of power was people. In similar ways, the control of women and their reproduction was important to the maintenance of the power of the patriarch, whether African chief or mission station head—Moffat even went so far, for example, as to attempt to discipline publicly Ann Hamilton, the wife of his colleague Robert Hamilton, for refusing to sleep with her husband.³⁹ Moffat was more a part of the African frontier world than he might have liked to admit.

A further critical point raised by this case study is that Africans transmitted Christianity more effectively than missionaries did. The centrality of Africans to the spread of Christianity means that much of the early history of the mission is unrecoverable. It is often unclear what kinds of Christianity were spread orally, for example. In other parts of southern Africa, prophetic figures emerged from time to time to use aspects of the Christian message in a context that suggests how quickly its language became unhinged from missionary guardianship. For example, Xhosa prophet and war hero Makanda Nxele (Makana), who led a Xhosa attack on the colony in 1819, had an earlier flirtation with the LMS; he was refused the right to work as a native agent when he insisted that there was a god for the white man and a god for the black man, and that he himself was related to Jesus Christ. The examples could be multiplied, as the Comaroffs would certainly agree. The lines between orthodoxy as the missionaries perceived it and African prophetic innovation were fluid and could be crossed in both directions, explaining the anxiety of white missionaries to bring Christianity back under control. In contrast to the Comaroffs, who emphasize the orthodoxy of the Nonconformists (whom they see in rather stereotypical, indeed Victorianist, terms), I would contend that this anxiety was familiar from debates within the European churches as well; after all, Methodism had once been perceived from within the citadels of Anglican orthodoxy in ways similar to Nonconformist views of African ecstatic innovation.⁴⁰

If in the early days of missionary activity, Christianity was never fully in the control of the white missionaries who had brought it and only became popular once it was spread mostly by Africans and then transformed in the process, what does this imply about how we might conceptualize the study of colonial missions? I have suggested in the past that the messy scenario I outline above, with its complications and its fudging across the fault lines, calls into question the utility at the micro level of a strict dialectical approach to the history of colonial Christianity. The ghost of French structuralist understandings of G. W. Hegel's master-slave dialectic seems to me to hover over and to constrain the first volume. In response, however, the Comaroffs argue in Volume 2 that I have too conventional an understanding of their view of dialectical processes. A dialectic is not a "formal, abstract, or strictly teleological movement through time and space," in a Hegelian sense. Rather, it is a "process of reciprocal determination; a process of material, social and cultural articulation—involving sentient human beings rather than abstract forces or structures."⁴¹ Colonialism is dialectical because it creates binary understandings of difference and depends on the idea of opposites; it is also presumably dialectical because colonial interaction shapes both the colonized and the colonizer in new ways. Returning to the issue at the end of Volume 2, the Comaroffs reiterate (although this seems to me a somewhat different take) that by "dialectics" they mean "the mutually transforming play of social forces whose outcome is neither linear nor simply overdetermined." Defined thus, they add, "it is hard to imagine how colonial history could be regarded as anything else."⁴² In a weak sense, this is undeniable. Furthermore, on this model, it may not matter that the early encounter between missionaries and Tswana was so much messier than a "dialectical" account would suggest. The Comaroffs' point is precisely that out of difference and mess colonialism created binary opposites.

At the same time, the exact nature of this process is often hard to capture. It is interesting to hear John Comaroff raise, in a recently published transcribed conversation with Homi Bhabha, what he terms the question of theory related to "the old Manichean opposition between colonizer and colonized, those 'iteratively marked,' positionally conflated points of reference around which the human geography of empire is so widely imagined. How, other than purely by descriptive insistence, does one displace the crushing logic of binarism in terms of which colonial worlds are apprehended and narrated?"⁴³ I think this is a genuine point of tension for the Comaroffs, and quite rightly for many others.

Perhaps my own discomfort arises from the difficulty of defining who the agents of dialectic are. In the end, the Comaroffs are interested in doing a historical anthropology of colonialism, more than of religion in colonial contexts. In this optic, the fault line of interest is that between colonized and colonizer. Religious belief did not, however, adhere to that fault line, even though both colonized and colonizers mobilized religion to the ends of power struggle. Nor of course was Christianity itself static. At the same time, the very notion of ethnic difference was still in the process of being worked out more broadly well past the early era of industrialization; therefore it was incorporated differently into the views of colonial evangelists at different times. From the point of view of the Comaroffs' overall narrative structure, this leads us away from the Enlightenment and onto the terrain of more immediately nineteenth-century colonial concerns. On this model, colonial conquest and the need to maintain and justify white rule shaped the mid-nineteenth-century culture of white Christianity. The end was not contained in the beginning but formed by colonial processes.

Be that as it may, it is instructive that the Khoesan themselves were not able indefinitely to maintain the interstitial status to which Christianity gave them some access. By the early 1850s, many living in the Cape Colony were forced to choose between the colonial binaries of "black" and "white," in the 1850–1853 frontier war in which many people of Khoesan descent rebelled to fight against the "white" colony, as "race" became the determinant of colonial identity.⁴⁴ The example also underscores the importance of "black" and "white" as colonial binaries arguably of more importance than "English" and "Tswana." All this should not, however, lead us to read the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in terms of the mid-nineteenth.

There is a basic problem here that dogs the Comaroffs throughout the books. Christianity is both text and practice, and therefore difficult to pin down. Not only that, it also permits and contains a wide variety both of practices and of different interpretations of its central themes. As text, Christianity became a free-floating signifier. As a practice, it was fought over bitterly by those who wanted to benefit from it. It is therefore difficult to identify Christianity clearly with one side of a dialectical or even dialogic model. This is all the more problematic because it is hard to define Christianity clearly, other than by appeals to authority. There was considerable scope for Africans to reinvent Christianity even from the beginning of the mission described by the Comaroffs. In some ways, this is precisely the Comaroffs' point: the signs of Christianity were fought over by competing ethnic groups. The Comaroffs nonetheless cannot bring themselves to see acceptance of Christianity in its unadulterated mission form as anything other than a defeat for African converts, who were thereby surrendering positions in the struggles over the colonization of consciousness. This position ultimately obscures complexity.

Eventually, one must confront the type of question raised by Leon de Kock, about disciplinary conventions and the fetishization of the archive.⁴⁵ De Kock argues that historians have spent too much time in their reaction to this wonderful book looking for factual flaws. To put the question in its boldest form, are the details really that essential to the overall project? Perhaps less tendentiously, what are the Comaroffs doing that goes beyond the reading of the words of colonists? The Comaroffs are important precisely because they move beyond words to decipher the gestures of people in the past. They put an anthropologist's emphasis on ritual and performance. They add thereby a crucial dimension to our reading of culture-bound historical archives. The Comaroffs' understanding of performance goes well beyond the staged performances of religious rites (although they acknowledge at the same time that people used the framework of religious ritual as a springboard for their own acting out of emotions and ideas). The missionaries are described as performing civilization, in the hope of educating the Tswana to adopt Western cultural practices through the power of display. In response, the Tswana performed noncompliance or acted out cultural bricolage. The tangible display of the body interests the Comaroffs, just as the material suffering of the colonized body that we readers know is to come provides a moral template for our reading of the early nineteenth century. The authors are particularly interested in space and the disposition of the body in space: their analyses frequently return, like the apartheid state itself, to issues of the control of the movement of African bodies.⁴⁶ The Comaroffs are in some ways mistrustful of the self-interested and one-sided colonial text and find more solidity in the unspoken exchanges of bodily performance.

It is this approach that both furnishes the greatest richness of the books and yet at the same time has excited unease in some interlocutors. If the evidence that remains of Tswana actions is mostly accounts of their physical activity, does that not place the reporter (the anthropologist, the historian, or even the reader) in the privileged position of interpreting Tswana actions, leaving the Tswana themselves rarely free to speak directly in their own voice? Is this even an accurate assessment of the nature of the historical record, or are there more extensive Tswana records? J. D. Y. Peel and Terence Ranger have both queried the absence of Tswana narrative in Of Revelation and Revolution's first volume, for example.⁴⁷ It seems unlikely that Christian converts did not leave a more extensive written record even in the early years of the mission or that community historical memory was not richer. The Comaroffs have responded that community historical narrative was not a genre espoused by the Tswana. They argue, furthermore, that the quest for "narrative" is elitist: it is "a short step from the stress on narrative to the history of elites, thence to elitist history."⁴⁸ The issue remains uneasily unresolved. For Paul Landau, the Comaroffs themselves have a culturally constrained view of what constitutes "genuine narrative." They pay "little attention to genealogy, song, Tswana conversation, letters, political speech, tales, myth or church charters—because they are not 'genuine' narratives. Consequently Tswana people's ideas of fulfillment and transcendence do not show themselves in either volume."⁴⁹ Even the Tswana intellectual and politician Sol Plaatje's great novel Mhudi, which draws on Tswana traditions about the difaqane, has been brought into the fray: for the Comaroffs, the fact that Plaatje himself claims that he could only gather material in fragments suggests that the southern Tswana indeed did not have a tradition of sustained historical narrative as late as the early twentieth century, even though Mhudi is more conventionally seen as a reflection at least to some extent of more sustained Tswana oral tradition.⁵⁰

There is another critical debate at work in these discussions of agency and voice. The Comaroffs are very clear that missionary activity was part of the victimization of Africans. Much recent scholarship on southern African Christianity emphasizes instead the agency of Africans in using and reshaping Christianity to their own ends, as the focus has shifted away from missionaries and onto African Christians. In some ways, the Comaroffs want to restore a sense of moral indignation at the ways in which colonial missions did change the consciousness of Africans in a damaging fashion. Ironically, this may involve seeing people as victims who did not necessarily see themselves that way at the time—another issue of authorial voice. The Comaroffs' anger represents nonetheless an important strand of longstanding protest across the colonized world at the "colonization of the mind."⁵¹ It is impossible to deny that many Christian missionaries had a profoundly negative impact in many areas of the world, not least when they gained (or were given) control of educational systems and thus had control over the formation of children.⁵² The fact that missionaries in various ways had such power was, however, almost invariably related to the expansion of the colonial state, not to the corrosive power of the message alone. Furthermore, as Peggy Brock has persuasively argued, missionary institutional structures affected the degree of control missionaries could exert over congregations, and these structures were affected by indigenous social arrangements as well as by state power.⁵³ I would further contend, in ways there is not space to elaborate on fully here, that shame was a key element of colonial control. Mission education could and did reinforce this. At the same time, Christianity could also provide a language through which to reclaim dignity and deny the shaming process.

I think it is important in sum to see Christianity as a language with many possible uses. Conversion, for example, fulfilled a wider and more flexible range of functions than is suggested by the Comaroffs' reduction of it to a symbolic field of struggle over capitalism. A reading that focuses too exclusively on Christianity as a language of cultural domination rather than a language with a multiplicity of possible meanings pays too much attention to the Western roots of Christianity and not enough to the multiple uses to which Africans very quickly put it. I make this comment in awareness of the extent to which the Comaroffs emphasize the need to explore African perspectives through every possible means, and the extent to which they clearly do this. However, conversion was even more of an empty signifier than the Comaroffs suggest, and some of these significations did not have a lot to do with rational capitalism. On the other hand, conversion was also an act, with attached rituals and beliefs, and this is important for understanding what the act meant in the immediate rather than long-term sense. Even if I am not completely at ease with a victimization model, I would want to add that these were and are enormously complicated processes. They had deep and often painful implications for many. This demands humility from any historian.

Undergirding much of the above has been a historian's concern with chronology, which, while justified, cannot do full justice to the rich ferment of ideas in these remarkable books. The Comaroffs in fact comment on what they see as different disciplinary conventions and their inherent costs and benefits. They see real and longstanding differences, as they remark at the end of Volume 2, between the ideal type of a more conventional historian and the archetypal historical anthropologist: "differences between the ideographic and the nomothetic, between the effort to arrive at the fullest possible description of events in their infinite particularity and the desire to pick out general principles across time and space." The latter approach, they underscore, "demands a certain boldness of abstraction" and is "inherently risky."⁵⁴ Although one would hope that historians are not as painstakingly antiquarian and abstraction-averse as this implies, there is some justice to the comment, at least as it pertains to the Comaroffs' own work. The very manner in which they offer up a multitude of bold ideas, fizzing with possibility, also ensures that they offer a number of hostages to fortune.

The Comaroffs are, for example, probably the most influential of recent scholars to argue for tight linkage between missionary activity, "modernity," "Enlightenment," and globalization. As Brian Stanley points out, this is also a question that has been much debated in the past few years by Christian theologians and mission theorists, with theologians paying particular attention to the damage done by the universalist truth claims of mission Christianity.⁵⁵ More broadly, the Comaroffs are participating in a vast debate about modernity and postmodernity among social, political, and cultural theorists that it would be foolhardy to venture upon here. Their contribution is both important and vexed: important because they show the culturally constrained nature of claims to "modernity," vexed because despite everything they reify the truth claims of modernity and have too neat a view of the "Enlightenment," despite substantial historical debate on the utility of the concept. In so doing, they exaggerate the long-term influence of mission Christianity on the material subjugation of the Tswana, particularly by minimizing the impact of illiberal forces and overemphasizing cultural change. This could be true, however, and the significance of the Comaroffs' analysis of practice still be undimmed.

The Comaroffs see "modernity" as "always historically constructed." It is in their view "an ideological formation in terms of which societies valorize their own practices by contrast to the specter of barbarism and other marks of negation."⁵⁶ The Comaroffs link modernity to a view of the self as a rights-bearing atomistic individual, ultimately the "fully fledged bourgeois subject." They further associate modernity with a wide-ranging series of cultural and economic practices, including but not limited to dependence on a worldwide market, industrialization, the use of money, the use of "advanced" agricultural practices, the promotion of individuated space, and a sense of the body as private.⁵⁷ It is part of the great richness of the Comaroffs' approach that they so fruitfully link cultural and economic practices, refusing to prioritize one over the other. At the same time, this view of modernity is slippery—and this is both its richness and an occasional source of frustration. The Comaroffs move between presenting the truth claims of modernity—its "text," if one likes—and the concrete material practices that advocates saw as characterizing the modern. The authors' desire not to take the truth claims of missionaries at face value make it difficult for them to spell out what, if any, were the irreducible material practices that defined modernity. If there weren't any, however, what was the material force behind the cultural claims and practices of missionaries?

Yet it is arguable that at least some of what the Comaroffs identify as the intellectual aspects of modernity are primarily identifiable with the truth claims of liberalism, and that the Comaroffs link these in turn to neoliberalism. There are echoes here of the great debates between radical and liberal historians in 1970s and 1980s South Africa, split over the origins of apartheid.⁵⁸ For the "radical" school, liberalism, in both its ideological and economic sense, contributed to the economic domination that was at the root of apartheid. Radical historians argued that late nineteenth-century British capitalism precipitated and anticipated many features of South African society under apartheid, just as the Comaroffs here blame nineteenth-century British liberal ideas about such things as money, markets, the individuated self, and the primacy of certain gender roles for the mental preparation of the Tswana for labor oppression. Indeed, in their 2000 article "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," the Comaroffs explicitly link what they term the "Age of Revolution" (1789–1848) to the current "Age of Millennial Capitalism" with their similar anxieties and ontological challenges.⁵⁹ This article makes explicit the magical, mystical elements of neoliberalism, and its culturally constrained forms, in contrast to neoliberals' claims to rationality and access to universal truth, just as Of Revelation and Revolution describes culturally constructed views of "modernity" and a "modern" economy.

This is very helpful. Nonetheless, I think it would also be useful in Of Revelation and Revolution to be more explicit about actual intellectual debates among and between people: to have more ideology in places and less hegemony. The argument made by many, that early twentieth-century white liberals in practice came to support racist segregationist policies, while in ideological terms liberalism's support of the free market economy and nonviolent political action left it with little space to mobilize opposition to apartheid, all adds up to a trenchant and at least partially justified critique. By leaving out of the picture the intellectual shifts in liberalism (and among the opponents of liberalism) on the ground in the nineteenth century (and implicitly in the twentieth), however, the Comaroffs, like other authors, conflate several ills into one.

Disciplinary specialists might want to throw further darts at the Comaroffs' narrative superstructure. Must industrialization and by implication modernity really begin in 1789? This is very French. What might be the impact of the questioning by economists of the linearity and suddenness of industrialization in Britain, which now looks more like an extended messy process than a "revolution" within neat chronological parameters? What difference does it make that the evangelical movement had many roots in seventeenth and eighteenth-century continental pietism? If Protestantism is the necessary condition of capitalism, where does this leave Catholic countries (not least France)?

The point I want to close on is, however, that of tragedy. If there is, as I have suggested, an implicit narrative of origins that runs throughout Of Revelation and Revolution and lends the work its moral passion, this is not, for all that, a straightforward linear narrative of beginnings and ends. Rather, it is marked by tragic irony and unexpected plot twists. The Nonconformist missionaries who labored so intensely to change the daily lives of Africans in order to induct them into the "modern" economy did not foresee the devastating consequences of that economy for the Tswana peasantry (as might be said of some of the missionaries' modern counterparts, development workers). At the same time, the Comaroffs write as though missionaries inducted the Tswana into the global market and colonized their consciousness in a way that made their engagement more likely. It seems to me just as possible that the global market and related economic coercion came crashing into the lives and consciousness of the Tswana in a way about which they could do little, particularly as their contact was frequently mediated by coercive legislation on the part of the colonial state.⁶⁰

Missionaries reflected the efforts of other Westerners to moralize the market: to see it as a force for moral good. In this, they shared the ambiguities (and guilty conscience?) of nineteenth-century liberalism. It does not take a great leap of the imagination to find contemporary parallels in the neoliberal discourse, and of course the Comaroffs are right that this putatively universalist creed contains deeply embedded culturally specific assumptions, as did nineteenth-century Anglo-American liberalism itself.⁶¹ If nonetheless market expansion is relatively inevitable, then is it not appropriate to ask on what terms this expansion might be the most moral? Or is the most appropriate response full-fledged resistance? Must the global marketplace necessarily be bad, on average, for Africa? From a somewhat different point on the ideological spectrum, one might also ask whether in fact Africa is incorporated into the global market on the equal terms supposedly demanded by neoliberal economics. These are clearly issues beyond the scope of this article, but not without historical parallels. In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century terms, the Tswana, it could be argued, were crowded out of an agricultural market in which many were making profits and farming more effectively than whites, in fact, in order to favor white farmers artificially and in order to bolster labor for the mines, again through "artificial" restraints on movement, through the theft of land, through racially targeted taxation, and through coercive legislation. This anticipated many of the later strategies of apartheid.⁶² It is not as clear to me as it is to the Comaroffs that the questions some missionaries and Africans were asking about the possibility of a just economy were not the right ones, even if the culturally constrained answers they gave were so obviously, hopelessly wrong. I do not have answers to these questions either—merely some sympathy with the misguided quest for certainty in a rapidly changing, brutal, and deeply uncertain economic universe.

I have suggested throughout this essay that the Comaroffs present nineteenth-century missionaries as fairly powerful figures, able to effect changes in the consciousness of Tswana interlocutors, despite the resistance of many. In contrast, I see Christianity as important but, with some important exceptions, not necessarily white missionaries themselves. I also suggest that the linkages between political and cultural colonialism are often unclear in Of Revelation and Revolution, and that the role of "cultural colonialism" is overdetermined. If it is possible to guess about such counterfactuals, I suspect that at least some of the missionaries whose work has been scrutinized by the Comaroffs would ironically have preferred the Comaroffs' account of their activities to mine, however doubtless upset they would have been at the implication that their preaching laid the groundwork for the Tswana's entrapment within enslaving capitalist systems. But the Comaroffs do give the missionaries credit for a coherent, rationalizing, globalizing system that taught one universal truth. They also recognize the missionaries' own belief that they might instill into their converts the necessary principles of "civilization" to transform totally their supposedly primitive economies and to move them rapidly up the scale of human development toward settled commercial societies. My own interpretation, while recognizing the tremendous importance of the universalizing project as a mode of domination, calls into question the capacity of Christianity to convey as effectively as it would have liked a message of unifying orthodoxy, or indeed the overall ability of missionaries to accomplish their objectives. From the very beginning of the activity of Christians in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, Christianity was out of control, unorthodox, and an available subject for reinterpretation in light of the needs of its interlocutors. Ironically, in sum, it is not always wise to take missionaries at their word.

Part of this article was presented in a much earlier version at the Twentieth Anniversary Conference of the Journal of Southern African Studies, York, 1994; I would like to thank the participants as well as those who subsequently commented helpfully, including David Maxwell, Norman Etherington, Ed Wilmsen, and Paul Landau. For reading the current essay, my particular thanks to Catherine Desbarats, Eric Jabbari, James Ron, and Michael Wasser, as well as to Tim Rowse, Desley Deacon, Ann Curthoys, and John Docker for helpful suggestions. I am of course solely responsible for the content. The research for this essay was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Elizabeth Elbourne is an associate professor in the Department of History at McGill University, where she teaches British and South African history. She is also currently a visiting fellow in the History Program of the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Her publications include Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (2002), as well as various articles, most recently "Domesticity and Disposession: British Ideologies of 'Home' and the Primitive at Work in the Early Nineteenth-Century Cape," in Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes, and Gary Minkley, eds., Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (2002). She earned her D.Phil. in 1992 from the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Terence Ranger. Her major fields of interest include colonialism, gender, and religion, especially the early nineteenth-century British white settler empire and southern Africa.Her current work in progress explores the creation of networks around the idea of being "aboriginal" in the early nineteenth-century British empire, and is focusing on links between New South Wales, the Cape Colony, New Zealand, and Canadian colonies as well as on activists in Great Britain. She is also writing on liberalism and Khoekhoe citizenship at the Cape.

Notes

¹ Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), and Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1997).

² Catherine Desbarats, "Essais sur quelques éléments de l'écriture de l'histoire amérindienne," Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 53, no. 4 (Spring 2000): 491–520, provides an interesting model, inspired among others by Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, and Kerwin Lee Klein, for the reading of various historical approaches to the colonial encounter as forms of narrative romance, given the inescapable narrativity of the historical text. Susan Newton-King, also drawing on Ricoeur, similarly reflects on the inescapable imposition of an artificial order on colonial encounters by the historian of colonialism. Newton-King,"Introduction," Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge, 1999). See also Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987); Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, 3 vols. (Paris, 1985–87).

³ Meghan Vaughan, "Colonial Discourse Theory and African History, or Has Postmodernism Passed Us By?" Social Dynamics 20, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 1–23; David Bunn, "The Insistence of Theory:Three Questions for Meghan Vaughan," Social Dynamics 20, no. 2: 24–34; Clifton Crais, "South Africa and the Pitfalls of Postmodern," South African Historical Journal, no. 31(1994): 274–79; Leon de Kock, "For and Against the Comaroffs: Postmodernist Puffery and Competing Conceptions of the 'Archive,'" South African Historical Journal, no. 31: 280–89. These authors take a variety of positions on the issues of whether or not the Comaroffs are postmodern and whether or not the rise of postmodernism in post-apartheid South African academic historical scholarship has been a positive development in a field that was previously (and in many ways still is) passionately materialist in approach.

⁴ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:xiii.

⁵ The original title of the series was reportedly From Revelation to Revolution, planned at a time before the release of Nelson Mandela. In a recent conversation with Homi Bhabha, however, John Comaroff is considerably less sanguine about the end of apartheid in South Africa and popular enthusiasm for Mandela outside South Africa, which he sees as a last gasp of modernist optimism in a postcolonial setting. Homi Bhabha and John Comaroff, "Speaking of Postcoloniality, in the Continuous Present: A Conversation," in David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson, eds., Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford, 2002).

⁶ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:171.

⁷ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:182.

⁸ Among many recent discussions of colonialism and European knowledge claims, see Ato Quayson and David Theo Goldberg,"Introduction: Scale and Sensibility," and Benita Parry,"Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies," in Goldberg and Quayson, Relocating Postcolonialism, xi–xxii and 66–81; Michael Adas, "From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History," AHR 106 (December 2001): 1692–1720; variousessays in Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 2000); Gyan Prakash, "Who's Afraid of Postcoloniality?" Social Text 49 (Winter 1996): 187–203;Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," AHR 99 (December 1994): 1475–90. On the reconfiguration of African history, see Frederick Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," AHR 99: 1516–45.

⁹ Colonialism was simultaneously a "process in political economy and culture," and these dimensions were "indissoluble aspects of the same reality, whose fragmentation into discrete spheres hides their ontological unity." Comarofff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2: 19.

¹⁰ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:6.

¹¹ Among many possibilities, some works of particular importance to southern Africa include Paul Stuart Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (London, 1995); Henry Bredekamp and Robert Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History (Johannesburg, 1995); Pier M. Larson, "'Capacities and Modes of Thinking': Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity," AHR 102 (October 1997): 969–1002; Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); and many other works discussed in David Chidester, Judy Tobler, and Darrel Wratten, Christianity in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1997). The sheer diversity of recent approaches to the history of mission Christianity, a growth field, is impossible to capture in a footnote but is suggested by works such as David Maxwell and Ingrid Lawrie, eds., Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings (Leiden, 2001); Nicholas Thomas, "Colonial Conversions:Difference, Hierarchy and History in Early Twentieth-Century Evangelical Propaganda," in Hall, Cultures of Empire; Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif., 1999); Peter van der Veer, ed., Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (London, 1996);Robert W. Hefner, ed., Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley, 1993); Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1989); and V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, Ind., 1988). The Currents in World Christianity Project, at the University of Cambridge, has also since 1996 lent considerable impetus to the scholarly study of missions. Along standing African literature reconsiders missions and the truth claims of missionaries, often from a theological perspective: for example, J. N. K. Mugambi, From Liberation to Reconstruction: African Christian Theology after the Cold War (Nairobi, 1996). Many works by African scholars are less well distributed in the West than they might be, given material constraints.From a wide variety of directions, missionary activity has become a newly invigorated area of research since the 1990s, although some of the more difficult underlying issues are perhaps not adequately discussed in all the literature.

¹² Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:8.

¹³ Terence Ranger, "Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa," African Studies Review 29 (1986): 1–69.

¹⁴ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:12.

¹⁵ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:17–18.

¹⁶ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:18.

¹⁷ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:17.

¹⁸ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans.(New York, 1991).

¹⁹ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:21.

²⁰ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:24, my emphases.

²¹ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:31.

²² Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago, 1985).Contrast J. M. Schoffeleers, "Ritual Healing and Political Acquiescence: The Case of the Zionist Churches in Southern Africa," Africa 61, no. 1 (1991): 1–25. Schoffeleers sees Zionist healing churches as not necessarily subversive of the established order and sometimes supportive of it.

²³ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:22.

²⁴ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:86. Those influenced by the Comaroffs in this respect include David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religionin Southern Africa (Charlottesville, Va., 1996); Leon de Kock, Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg, 1996);Doug Stuart, "'Of Savages and Heroes': Discourses of Race, Nation and Gender in the Evangelical Missions to Southern Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century" (PhD dissertation, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1994). This approach of course represents the concerns of many scholars of the British Empire and the related construction of British identity. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978; 2d edn., 1996); Henry L. Gates, ed., Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago, 1986); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, Conn., 1992); Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), including Stoler and Cooper, "Rethinking a Research Agenda."

²⁵ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:24.

²⁶ My re-reading of the opening encounter is based on my own work on LMS archives, which I consulted primarily with the aim of writing about contestation over the uses of Christianity within the Cape Colony and with a focus on Khoesan not Tswana uses of Christianity. It seems to me fruitful, however, to unite diverse perspectives on a very complex subject. Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002). There were four LMS delegations to the Tswana to establish a mission, not two as the Comaroffs have it.

²⁷ Johannes du Bruyn, "Of Muffled Tswana and Overwhelming Missionaries: The Comaroffs and the Colonial Encounter," South African Historical Journal, no. 31 (1994): 294–309; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1: 275–76. On Tswana views of the firearms frontier, see Robert Moffat to Richard Miles, Lattakoo [Kuruman], December 5, 1827, in Isaac Schapera, ed., Apprenticeship at Kuruman: Being the Journals and Letters of Robert and Mary Moffat, 1820–1828 (London, 1951), 274. Other letters in this collection describe frequent deadly raids throughout the 1820s, in which a wide variety of often ethnically mixed groups preyed on one another. On Cape influence, see also Johannes du Bruyn,"James Read en die Thlaping, 1816–1820," Historia 35(1990).

²⁸ Julian Cobbing, "The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo," Journal of African History 29, no. 3 (1988):487–519; Caroline Hamilton, ed., Mfecane Aftermath (Johannesburg, 1996), including Neil Parsons, "Prelude to Difaqane in the Interior of Southern Africa c. 1600–1822," 323–49; Neil Parsons, "Kicking the Hornets' Nest: A Third View of the Cobbing Controversy on the Mfecane/Difaqane," address to the University of Botswana History Society, Gabarone, Botswana, March 16, 1999 (available online through the University of Botswana History Department web page, at http://ubh.tripod.com/ub/np.htm).

²⁹ This discussion both here and below draws on Robert Ross, Adam Kok's Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge, 1976); Elizabeth Elbourne and Robert Ross, "Combating Spiritual and Social Bondage: Early Missions in the Cape Colony," in Elphick and Davenport, Christianity in South Africa; Alan Barnard, Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples (Cambridge, 1992), 156–75, 193–94; Martin Legassick, "The Northern Frontier to c. 1840: The Rise and Decline of the Griqua People," in Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 358–420;Nigel Penn, "The Orange River Frontier Zone, c. 1700–1805," in Andrew B. Smith, ed., Einiqualand: Studies of the Orange River Frontier (Cape Town, 1995); Karel Schoeman, ed., Griqua Records: The Philippolis Captaincy, 1825–1861 (Cape Town, 1996).Mary and Robert Moffat's letters and journals make the station's vulnerability and its reliance on Griqua protection abundantly clear.See Schapera, ed., Apprenticeship at Kuruman.

³⁰ Robert Hamilton to LMS Directors, Griquatown, April 28, 1816, London Missionary Society Papers, South Africa Correspondence–Incoming, 6/3/C, Council for World Mission Archives, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London(hereafter, LMS-SA). See also LMS-SA, 6/3/C: J. Evans, R. Hamilton, and W. Corner to LMS Directors, Griquatown, May 27, 1816; LMS-SA, 6/3/C: R.Hamilton to LMS Directors, Griquatown, November 13, 1816.

³¹ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:78.

³² John Campbell, Travels in South Africa (London, 1815).The full extent of Khoesan missionary activity emerges most clearly from Campbell's unpublished journals, held at the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.

³³ LMS-SA, 5/2/F: "Minutes of the First Conference held by the African Missionaries at Graaff Reinet in August 1814"; V. C. Malherbe, "The Life and Times of Cupido Kakkerlak," Journal of African History 20 (1979): 365–79; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2: 81, on Robert Moffat's campaign against Kakkerlak.

³⁴ LMS-SA, 6/4/A: James Read to Joseph Hardcastle, Bethelsdorp, August 7, 1816.

³⁵ See Schapera, ed., Apprenticeship at Kuruman.

³⁶ Landau, Realm of the Word; Elbourne, Blood Ground. On Helmore's dismissal, see LMS-SA, 19/2/A: James Read to LMS Directors, Philipton, June 3, 1843. The LMS Directors overturned the dismissal and censured Philip.

³⁷ An interesting point of contrast is provided by Janet Hodgson,"A Battle for Sacred Power: Christian Beginnings among the Xhosa,"in Elphick and Davenport, Christianity in South Africa.

³⁸ Terence Ranger, "The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History," in Hefner, Conversion to Christianity, 65–98.

³⁹ Karel Schoeman, A Thorn Bush That Grows in the Path: The Missionary Career of Ann Hamilton, 1815–1823 (Cape Town, 1995);LMS-SA, 8/3/B: Robert Moffat to LMS, Lattakoo, July 12, 1821.

⁴⁰ Among many possibilities, see Deborah Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton, N.J., 1985).

⁴¹ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:29.

⁴² Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:410.

⁴³ Bhabha and Comaroff, "Speaking of Postcoloniality," 22.

⁴⁴ Elbourne, Blood Ground, 345–76; Robert Ross, "The Kat River Rebellion and Khoikhoi Nationalism: The Fate of an Ethnic Identification," Kronos: Journal of Cape History/Tydskrif vir Kaaplandse Geskiedenis 24 (November 1997): 91–105. On the emergence of racial stratification more generally, 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); Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville, Va., 1996).

⁴⁵ De Kock, "For and Against the Comaroffs."

⁴⁶ For example, Volume 2 tellingly argues that integral to the late nineteenth-century struggle over African labor was a further struggle over the "distribution of people in space and, concomitantly, their passage across the social landscape." This is a typical discussion of space that appropriately reflects the struggle of the apartheid state to control the physical body, just as slavery had earlier lent mastery of the body to the slaveowner. Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2: 203. Rikk van Dijk and Peter Pels,"Contested Authorities and the Politics of Perception: Deconstructing the Study of Religion in Africa," in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, eds., Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996), 245–70; Célestin Monga, The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa, Linda Fleck and Célestin Monga, trans. (Boulder, Colo., 1996), 112–15, on the "subversive and silent" nature of many African forms of dissent.

⁴⁷ J. D. Y. Peel, "For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995): 581–607; Terence Ranger, "No Missionary: No Exchange: No Story? Narrative in Southern Africa," unpublished paper read at All Souls College, Oxford, June 1992.

⁴⁸ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:51.

⁴⁹ Paul Landau, "Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution," Africa 70, no. 3 (2000): 516.

⁵⁰ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:46–47.

⁵¹ Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (1978), provides an eloquent locus classicus, as does Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London, 1962). Dickson A. Mungazi, The Mind of Black Africa (Westport, Conn., 1996), expresses typical anger, pp.1–32. Greg Cuthbertson discusses Christian missions as a form of cultural violence in Charles Villa-Vicencio, ed., Theology and Violence: The South African Debate (Johannesburg, 1987). Sanneh, Translating the Message, emphasizes in contrast indigenous agency in the "translation" of Christianity from one culture to another. At a different end of the spectrum of debate might be those who see efforts to change the religious systems of indigenous peoples as a form (or as an element) of cultural genocide. A. Dirk Moses gives an eloquent overview of debates about genocide and cultural genocide: "Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the 'Racial Century': Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust," Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002).

⁵² A wonderfully instructive example of the ambiguities of Christian liberal control of the education system in South Africa, just before apartheid, is furnished by Shula Marks, ed., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (London, 1985).

⁵³ Peggy Brock, "Mission Encounters in the Colonial World: British Columbia and South-West Australia," Journal of Religious History 24, no. 2 (June 2000): 159–79.

⁵⁴ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:411.

⁵⁵ Brian Stanley, "Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: A Reevaluation," in Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2001), 1–2. Stanley points to David Bosch's Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1991) as a seminal text for Christian theologians of mission in a postmodern context.

⁵⁶ Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:32.

⁵⁷ A particularly influential figure for the Comaroffs' reading of the creation of the modern self in Volume 2 is Charles Taylor, whose Sources of the Self is a seminal text for their work. Taylor is of course a Christian Hegelian, whose view of the emergence of the modern self is certainly influenced by Hegelian dialectics, in however inexplicit a fashion. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989).

⁵⁸ Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town, 1988), describes the liberal/radical split.

⁵⁹ Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism:First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 12, no.2 (2000): 334. This issue has been reprinted as Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, N.C., 2001).

⁶⁰ This is a point also made by Landau, "Hegemony and History."

⁶¹ Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999); Mehta,"Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," in Stoler and Cooper, Tensions of Empire, 59–86.

⁶² Ted Matsetela, "The Life Story of Mma-Pooe: Aspects of Sharecropping and Proletarianization in the Northern Orange Free State 1890–1930," in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, eds., Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa (New York, 1982), 212–37; Charles Van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894–1985 (Cape Town, 1996).

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