Chapter 10 - Transitions through the Mission

Summary

While the mission record provides some access to African voices, and also to the response of Africans to the Hermannsburgers, it is necessary to venture beyond the mission record to gain a clearer understanding of such voices. Here, autobiographies are a useful source, though of course, such writing is not unmediated. Conventional notions of authorship and the subject are challenged in an account which suggests that a ‘host of people’ are normally involved ‘in the making of autobiographical accounts’. The reasons for collaboration in autobiography are varied. Although such textual collaboration ‘mirror[s] an intimacy in personal relationships’, it is necessary to distinguish between ‘advocatory texts, where the writing author speaks on behalf of the oral narrator’, ‘texts in which the writing author plays a mediating role’ and ‘truly collaborative texts in which the participants are on a comparatively equal footing’. This chapter explores two autobiographies in the light of these considerations. Although these autobiographies are not direct reflections on the transition from mission education to Bantu Education, they nevertheless provide insights into, and a sense of, the experiences of Africans with regard to education by the Hermannsburg Mission. In a context where the formal archival records provide little in the way of such experiences, these autobiographies are very useful. In parts, they provide an interesting contrast with Micah Kgasi's Thutô ke eng?, discussed in Chapter 1, which is only partly autobiographical.

In 1971, a London-based publisher, C. Hurst and Company, published Naboth Mokgatle's Autobiography of an Unknown South African, and in 1986 the Killie Campbell Africana Library together with Natal University Press published Paulina Dlamini: Servant of Two Kings, essentially a book of reminiscences, or a memoir, compiled by Heinrich Filter. Kgasi was born in the late 1870s or early 1880s, in the Western Transvaal. Paulina Dlamini, a contemporary of Kgasi, was born near Babanango in Zululand. S. Bourquin, translator and editor of the reminiscences compiled by Filter, suggests that Dlamini was about 67 years old in 1925; thus, she was probably born around 1858, shortly after the arrival of the Hermannsburgers in Natal. Naboth Mokgatle was born in 1911 on the mission station Saron, at Phokeng, in the district of Rustenburg, half a century after their arrival in the Western Transvaal.