Scholarship on the history of the mission-founded Churches of Africa has been meagre in comparison with the numerous volumes devoted to the African-instituted Churches and, more recently, the neo-Pentecostal churches. This relative neglect may betray a questionable assumption that Africans who have remained loyal to the historic mission churches have been lacking in initiative or theological creativity. Graham Duncan's study of the Bantu Presbyterian Church of South Africa (BPCSA), its denominational predecessors and successors, is thus to be warmly welcomed. The BPCSA, established in 1923, was the first African Church formed in southern Africa other than by a schism from a mission Church. It was also the only African Church to be given a voice in the Native Affairs Commission set up by the South African government in the same year. The BPCSA was the product of the missionary work of the United Free Church of Scotland and its two forebears, the Free Church of Scotland and the United Presbyterian Church. It was quite distinct from the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa (the Church formed by Scottish settlers in the region), and also excluded a substantial number of Black congregations within the Presbytery of Kaffraria, whose missionary leaders were fearful of the degree of power given to Black leadership in the new Church. The BPCSA continued under its original name until 1999, when the new multiracial climate created by the end of White rule in 1994 led to the abandonment of the discredited label of ‘Bantu’, and a change of name to the Reformed Presbyterian Church of South Africa. Union with White Presbyterians followed in 1999, creating the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. One further piece in this complex denominational jigsaw was provided by the older Presbyterian Church of Africa, an ‘Ethiopian’ style of Black Church created in 1898 when Pambani Mzimba, an outstanding ministerial product of the Lovedale Mission of the Free Church of Scotland, seceded from the Free Church Mission with many of his followers in a dispute over mission funds and property.
Duncan presents engaging studies of key African Presbyterian leaders such as Mzimba and the Scottish-trained Xhosa minister Tiyo Soga (1829–71). Soga was the first Black African to be trained and ordained to the ministry in Scotland; the United Presbyterian Church sent him back to Africa as a missionary to his own people. Attention is also paid to the lesser-known figure of Edward Tsewu, another fruit of the Lovedale Institution, who in 1896 had led an earlier secession from the Free Church mission in Johannesburg. Duncan also includes vignettes of important Presbyterian women in South Africa, such as the pioneering medical missionary Dr Jane Waterston and Charity Majiza from the Ciskei, who in 1978 became the first woman to be ordained as a minister of the BPCSA; in 1998 she was appointed General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches.
Duncan's history focuses on complicated institutional developments and arguments – which were more often about money and property (and hence ultimately about power) than about theology. It is at its most illuminating in its exposition of how the mission councils, set up by the Foreign Mission Committee of the United Free Church with the noble ideal of preparing the native Churches for self-government, self-funding and self-propagation, in practice functioned as arenas of White male missionary control and barriers to African advancement. In this respect, Duncan's history forms a Presbyterian equivalent to C. Peter Williams's The ideal of the self-governing Church (1990), a path-breaking study of how the Church Missionary Society failed to be true to its own three-self ideals, though Williams's book covered all areas of the Anglican society's work, rather than just one field as in Duncan's book.
This book is not an easy read, particularly to those unfamiliar with Presbyterian ecclesiastical structures and terminology. The reader's task is made more difficult by the choice of a social-science author-date form of referencing rather than the humanities style of footnotes. As a commendable variety of archival sources have been consulted, the result is that too many paragraphs are continually broken up by often lengthy archival references inserted in parentheses. It also has to be said that the text has been very poorly copy-edited and as such departs from the normal high standards of the Scottish Religious Cultures Historical Perspectives series. There are quite frequent typographical errors or omissions, and some unfortunate instances where blocks of text are duplicated on different pages, sometimes more than once. A number of sources referenced in the text do not appear within the bibliography, which confusingly lists individual documents incorporated in a single alphabetical sequence alongside printed works; it also contains some duplication. The Revd Tiyo Burnside Soga (1871–1936) was the nephew of Tiyo Soga and not his son, as stated on p. 135. The index confuses the two by combining them in a single entry. A list of abbreviations would have been helpful to guide the non-specialist through the maze of different Scottish and South African Presbyterian Churches.
Whilst this work will be a useful quarry for scholars working on the history of mission Christianity in South Africa, it is unlikely to set new intellectual agendas. Amidst the welter of information on church and mission structures and conflicts, the reader is inclined to look for more insight into the dynamics of regular church life, worship, preaching and evangelistic expansion. The author, who writes as a critical inside observer – he was a Church of Scotland missionary assigned to work within the BPCSA – concludes fairly that this was a ‘Scottish church in South Africa’ (p. 124), lacking in contextual relevance. It was decidedly formal, cerebral and non-affective in its Reformed patterns of worship (p. 128). Readers can be forgiven for reaching the depressing conclusion that this mission Church was, after all, largely an alien import, far removed from the vibrant styles of African Christianity that now form the object of so much scholarly attention.
