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‘A Sentimental Attachment to the Neighbourhood’: African Christians and Land Claims in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Deborah James  and
Geoffrey Nkadimeng
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Extract

As part of its attempt to understand ‘an apartheid of souls’, this volume is concerned to show how mission activity, particularly that of European-based churches with close links to the expansion of Dutch/Calvinist influence, may have nurtured the local construction of race or ethnic difference in Indonesian and South African society. One well-known account of Christianity in South Africa shows how the interaction between mission and missionised produced a sharply dichotomised sense - experienced by the Tshidi Tswana as the contrast between setsivana and segoa - of difference between indigenous and imported culture. While this shows how processes devoted to undermining it may paradoxically strengthen a sense of cultural identity, what it does not yield is a sense of how Christianity, appropriated within Tswana and other African societies, furnished a means of marking internal distinctions of social class, dovetailing in unexpected ways with ethnic difference. It is such divisions - potently fusing class with ethnicity and having crucial implications for the ownership, reclaiming, and use of land - with which the present paper is concerned.

Type
Conference: ‘An Apartheid of Souls’
Information
Itinerario , Volume 27 , Special Issue 3-4: An Apartheid of Souls , November 2003 , pp. 243 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2003

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References

Notes

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