An Age of Hubris: Colonialism, Christianity and the Xhosa in the Nineteenth Century

This seminar discussion will be based on my recent book with the above title, published by University of Virginia Press. This book sets out to examine the impact of missionary enterprise on the Xhosa chiefdoms of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century. It aims to contribute new approaches to Xhosa history, as well as a new dimension to the much-trodden but still very important, seminal topic of the impact – cultural, social and political – of missionary activity amongst African peoples. My approach is to use the missionary sources to prise open the ways in which Africans utilised new ideas, resources, signs and practices to make sense of, react to, and resist the forces of colonial dispossession confronting them. 

The book integrates an examination of the evangelical “empire of God” with a primary focus on the Xhosa people. It surveys mission enterprise as a manifestation of metropolitan history as well as investigating the African world it entered and partially shaped. It moves from a consideration of conversion and cultural adaptation in general terms to an analysis of Xhosa society and history in particular. It incorporates a consideration of missionaries and their world as well as a study of the chiefs and elites who welcomed or resisted them. It explores complex questions of ethnicity and identity in relation to the Xhosa. It investigates translation and cultural interaction as well as the ways in which Africans adapted and absorbed new resources, beliefs and practices, and bent them to their own purposes. It is a story that emphasises missionary failure and African agency, punctuated by war and millenarian eruptions, and the steady encroachment of settler land hunger and colonial hegemony. All these topics are in need of new approaches and a new synthesis, in a part of Africa where colonial encroachment, conquest and rule predated similar developments anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa and had more disruptive consequences than in most parts.

- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.