Anouska Jha
BA History
October 2022
This issue’s collection of choice at the British Online Archives is entitled ‘Accounts of South Africa from the first missionaries from 1820-1900. It is a vast database of correspondence papers, narrative accounts, and letters in the context of the United Society Partners in Gospel (USPG). This was an Anglican missionary group operating from the 18-20th centuries, with the aim to establish the spread of Christianity in Africa.
I believe this is an important contribution to the theme of Black History Month, as the reverberations of colonial rule across the Global South and its impact on contemporary African national and ethnic identity is significant. This archive is a major contribution to the existing scholarship of British colonialism in South Africa, which was first occupied in 1795, colonised in 1806 and declared a dominion of the empire in 1910. British Christian missionary groups such as the Free Church of Scotland among the Zulu aimed to indirectly explore areas of national economic interest and religious fidelity through involvement in local agriculture and community life. Christian evangelists were intimately involved in the colonial processes of South Africa, instilling an imprint of capitalist culture and giving rise to protest and resistance. They were vital elements of the colonial encounter and shaped not only religious outlook but politics, medicine and social relations.
The archives themselves cover the regions of Capetown, Zululand, Natal and Grahamstown. The unique feature of this archive and its potential interest for researchers is its cross-disciplinary reach; it covers, for example, statistical documents detailing how effectively missions were drawing in worshippers in Capetown, records of the expansion of dioceses of St Johns in Kaffraria, and the tactics of missionaries to allure distrusting chiefs of Zululand and Swaziland.
A particular source of interest is taken from the Archive’s ‘Capetown’ collection (C/AFS/L). This document contains letters of exchange between British missionary individuals such as E.Burrow, C.Maynard and John Heavyside.
A letter from Charles Maynard (17 September 1831) to Hamilton, likely a local chief in Algea Bay in Cape of Good Hope, On the Finances of Church at Fort Elizabeth), is exemplary of the economic and cognitive underpinnings of missionaries. The first line of the letter talks of the ‘maturity of the Bill for £300, drawn by the Church Committee of Algae Bay’. This largely factual statement is then followed by claims of the missionaries’ gradual lack of confidence in their work. Maynard states ‘the truth is that without your society, I fear our Church is most likely to be exempted’. An earlier letter dated to 11 September similarly talks of the need to ‘further enforce the Books of this Society which may give us the advantages of this fund’. Even those with little prior knowledge of the missionary objective in South Africa can detect a sense of fear and wavering authority in Maynard’s words. That he had to secure funding from local church networks, and regularly maintained contact with the Church of the Cape of Good Hope, invites research into the relations between British missionaries and Africans who accommodated and funded their aims. Moreover, the fearful tone evoked by Maynard’s frequent apologies of his ‘troublesome’ letters suggests a degree of agency of the South African periphery; did local chiefs welcome missionaries due to their usefulness in secular spheres such as diplomacy and technology? Does Maynard’s tone further suggest caution against resistors of missionary elites? As with all sources on the British Archives, these primary documents reveal much about the individual correspondances of colonial elites, colonial subjects, and their intersecting aims.
I invite all historians to browse this archive; it is a rich collection of letters and statistics which are useful to historians of colonialism, economic history and social histories!
Editor's note: This article was written in collaboration with the British Online Archives by Third Year historian Anouska Jha. It was published in the 'Black Histories' issue of the UCL History Journal in October 2022. Click here to read the full issue!
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