Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-01T02:10:23.194Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘I don’t sing for people who do not see me’:1 Women, Gender and the Historiography of Christianity in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Greg Cuthbertson
Affiliation:
University of South Africa, Pretoria
Louise Kretzschmar
Affiliation:
University of South Africa, Pretoria

Extract

One of the cultural features of South Africa’s new democracy is the prolific publication of autobiographical narratives by previously marginalized people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has also focused attention on the plight of oppressed groups under apartheid, and many of the voices being heard are those of women. These personal accounts are breathing life into the sinews of organized political protest and – to mix metaphors – unearthing the ‘hidden past’ interred in apartheid history. As Alison Goebel also reminds us, life histories or personal narratives have long been identified as ‘an ideal feminist method’, and have frequently been used in work about African women.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

McCordMargaret, The Calling of Katie Makanya (Cape Town, 1995), p. 57.

References

2 See, for example, Natoo Babenia. Memoirs of a Saboteur Reflections of my Political Activity in India and South Africa, as Told by Ian Edwards (Bellville, 1995); Matthews, Frieda Bokwe, Remembrances (Bellville, 1995).Google Scholar

3 For a literary overview, see Daymond, y, ‘Gender and “History”: 1980s South African women’s stories in English’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 27 (1996), pp. 191213 Google Scholar. For discussion of women’s autobiographies, see Judith L. Coullie, ‘(In)Continent I-lands: blurring the boundaries between self and other in South African women’s autobiographies’, ibid., pp. 133–48.

4 Alison Goebel, ‘Life histories as a cross-cultural feminist method in African Studies: achievements and blunders’, paper presented at the ‘Promoting women’s history: local and regional perspectives’ conference, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 6 July 1995.

5 See, for example, Nicholas Southey, ‘Uncovering homosexuality in colonial South Africa: the case of Bishop Twells’, unpublished paper, 1995 (by kind permission of the author); Andries du Plessis, ‘Gender studies and homosexuality: where are the histories?’, paper presented at The future of the past: the production of history in a changing South Africa’ conference, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, 10–12 July 1996.

6 McCord, The Calling of Katie Makanya.

7 Ibid., p. 57.

8 Mager, Anne, review of The Calling of Katie Makanya, South African Historical Journal [hereafter SAHJ], 34 (1996).Google Scholar

9 Quoted in Parsons, Neil, ‘Imperial history in the Ukay – the “South Africa 1895–1921: test of empire” conference at Oxford, March 1996’, SAHJ, 34 (1996).Google Scholar

10 Ngwenya, Thengani H., ‘The Calling’, Southern African Review of Books [hereafter SARB], 39–40 (1995), pp. 67.Google Scholar

11 A term used in David Attwell, The transculturation of enlightenment: the exemplary case of the Rev Tiyo Soga, African nationalist’, in Denis, Philippe, ed., The Making of an Indigenous Clergy in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 1995), pp. 4157.Google Scholar

12 For a history of the ICU, see Bradford, Helen, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930 (New Haven, CT, 1987)Google Scholar, especially her discussion of ‘Separatist Christianity and Garveyism’, pp. 123–7.

13 McCord, Calling of Katie Makanya, p. 219.

14 Wells, Julia, We Now Demand! The History of Women’s Resistance to the Pass Laws in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1993), p. 10.Google Scholar

15 Kadalie, Rhoda, ‘Where’s the rock?’, SARB, 37 (1995), p. 7.Google Scholar

16 Bozzoli, Berlinda, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 (Johannesburg, 1991)Google Scholar; Marks, Shula, ed., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Pietermaritzburg, 1987)Google Scholar; and Shula Marks, The context of the personal narrative: reflections on Not Either an Experimental Dolt: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women’, in Personal Narratives Group, eds, Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington, IN, 1989), pp. 39–58.

17 See Elphick, Richard, ‘Writing religion into history: the case of South African Christianity’, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 21 (1995), pp. 121.Google Scholar

18 Johannes du Bruyn and Nicholas Southey, The treatment of Christianity and Protestant missionaries in South African historiography’, in Bredekamp, Henry and Ross, Robert, eds, Missions and Christianity in South African History (Johannesburg, 1996), p. 35.Google Scholar

19 Hetherington, Penelope, ‘Women in South Africa: the historiography in English’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26 (1993), pp. 24169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Norman Etherington, ‘Recent trends in the historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa’, paper presented at the “Paradigms lost; paradigms regained’ conference to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Journal of Southern African Studies, York, England, Sept. 1994, p. 27.

21 Deborah Gaitskell, ‘“Wailing for purity”: prayer unions, African mothers, and adolescent daughters, 1912–1940’, in Marks, S. and Rathbone, A, eds, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (London, 1982), pp. 33857.Google Scholar

22 Gaitskell, ‘Wailing for purity’, p. 338.

23 Gaitskell, Deborah, ‘Housewives, maids or mothers? Some contradictions of domesticity for Christian women in Johannesburg, 1903–1939’, Journal of African History, 24 (1983), pp. 24156 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Gaitskell, Deborah, ‘Devout domesticity? A century of African women’s Christianity in South Africa’, in Walker, Cherryl, ed., Women and Gender in South Africa to 1945, 2nd edn (Cape Town, 1990), pp. 25172.Google Scholar

25 Deborah Gaitskell, Praying and preaching: the distinctive spirituality of African women’s Church organizations’, in Bredekamp and Ross, Missions and Christianity, p. 228.

26 Deborah Gaitskell, ‘“The Bantu people are very emotional”: comparing churchwomen’s organizations in early 20th century South Africa’, presented at the ‘Promoting women’s history’ conference.

27 There is some work on the gendered history of men For example, Moodie, T. Dunbar, ‘Migrancy and male sexuality on the South African gold mines’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 14 (1987–8), pp. 22856 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Beinart, William, ‘Political and collective violence in South African historiography’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18 (1992), pp. 45586 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, first rendered as ‘Violence and masculinity in South African historiography’, presented at the conference Towards a gendered history of men in Africa’, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, April 1990.

28 Ranger, Terence, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe 1920–1964 (London, 1995), pp. 3262.Google ScholarPubMed

29 Helen Bradford, ‘Women in the Cape and its frontier zones, c.1800-1870: a critical essay on androcentric historiography’, paper presented at the South African Historical Society biennial conference, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, July 1995, p. 2.

30 See for example, Hofmeyr, y and Pillay, G., eds, A History of Christianity in South Africa, Volume 1 (Pretoria, 1994)Google Scholar for Church history, and Davenport, T. R. H., South Africa: A Modern History, 4th edn (London, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for general South African history. See also Helen Bradford’s critique of Beinart, William, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar: ‘Not a general history?’, SAHJ, 32 (1995), pp. 247–9.

31 Bradford, ‘Women in the Cape’, pp. 3–36.

32 Spuy, Patricia van der, ‘Women in the index’, SARB, 43 (1996), pp. 1113.Google Scholar

33 Maniconi, Linzi, ‘Ruling relations: rethinking state and gender in South African history’, Journal of African History, 33 (1992), p. 442.Google Scholar

34 Elphick, ‘Writing religion into history’, p. 18. See also the critical discussion about whether or not feminism and post-modernism are ‘natural allies’ in Assiter, Alison, Enlightened Women: Modernist Feminism in a Postmodern Age (London, 1996), especially PP. 45.Google Scholar

35 On state and gender, see Manicom, ‘Ruling relations’, pp. 441–65; and Parpart, Jane L. and Staudt, Kathleen A., eds, Women and the State in Africa (Boulder, CO, 1989).Google Scholar

36 Elphick, ‘Writing religion into history’, p. 15.

37 Etherington, ‘Recent trends’, p. 11.

38 Schoeman, Karel, ‘A Thorn Bush that Grows in the Path’: The Missionary Career of Ann Hamilton, 1815–1823 (Cape Town, 1995)Google Scholar; Millard, Joan, ‘Anne Hodgson – missionary and mystic’, Theologica Evangelica, 26 (1993), pp. 5563 Google Scholar; and Brenda Nicholls, ‘Harriette Colenso and the issues of religion and politics in colonial Natal’, in Bredekamp and Ross, Missions and Christianity, pp. 173–88.

39 Nicholls, ‘Harriette Colenso’, p. 173.

40 Robert, Dana, ‘Mount Holyoke women and the Dutch Reformed missionary move ment, 1874–1904’, Missionalia, 21 (1993), pp. 10323.Google Scholar

41 Norman Etherington, ‘Gender issues in south-east African missions, 1835–85’, in Bredekamp and Ross, Missions and Christianity, pp. 136, 137, 146, 150. Also see Jennifer A. Seif, Gender, Tradition and Authority in 19th Century Natal: The Zulu Missions of the American Board, forthcoming.

42 Recently the work of the Comaroffs has been criticized by a number of southern Africanists. See, for example, Clifton C. Crais, ‘South Africa and the pitfalls of postmodernism’; Leon de Kock, ‘For and against the Comaroffs: postmodern puffery and competing conceptions of the “archive”’; Doug Stuart, ‘Revelations from neo-modernity’; and Bruyn, Johannes du, ‘Of muffled Southern Tswana and overwhelming missionaries: the Comaroffs and the colonial encounter’, SAHJ, 31 (1994), pp. 273309.Google Scholar

43 Sheila Meintjies, ‘Family and gender in the Christian community at Edendale, Natal, in colonial times’, in Walker, Women and Gender, pp. 125–45; Heather Hughes, ‘“A lighthouse for African womanhood”: Inanda seminary, 1869–1945’, ibid., pp. 197–220.

44 Landau, Paul S., The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (London, 1995), p. xvii.Google Scholar

45 Jean, and Comaroff, John, ‘Home-made hegemony: modernity, domesticity, and colonialism in South Africa’, in Hansen, Karen Tranberg, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New York, 1992), pp. 3774.Google Scholar

46 Landau, Realm of the Word, pp. 93–110.

47 Ibid., p. 219.

48 Bowie, Fiona, Kirkwood, Deborah, and Ardener, , eds, Women and Missions: Past and Present. Anthropological and Historical Perceptions, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women, 11 (Oxford, 1993), pp. xviixx.Google Scholar

49 Cecillie Swaisland, ‘Wanted – earnest, self-sacrificing women for service in South Africa: nineteenth-century recruitment of single women to Protestant missions’, in Bowie, Women and Missions, pp. 70–84.

50 Coetzee, Carli, ‘Mission accomplished’, SARB, 38 (1995), p. 9.Google Scholar

51 See Julia Wells, ‘Putting gender into South African history’, paper presented at the ‘Promoting Women’s History’ conference.

52 Natasha Erlank, ‘Missionary wives and perceptions of race in the early nineteenth century Cape Colony’, paper presented to the ‘Promoting Women’s History’ conference.

53 Kretzschmar, Louise, ‘Olive Carey Doke: a neglected Baptist pioneer’, in Landman, Christina, ed., Digging up our Foremothers: Stories of Women in Africa (Pretoria, 1996), pp. 14166.Google Scholar

54 Jacobs, Sylvia M., ‘Give a thought to Africa: black women missionaries in Southern Africa’, in Chauduri, Nupur and Strobel, Margaret, eds, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992), pp. 20728.Google Scholar

55 Schoeman, Karel, Die Wêreld van Susanna Smit, 1799–1863 (Cape Town, 1995).Google Scholar

56 Coetzee, ‘Mission accomplished’, p. 11: translation of Schoeman, Wêreld van Susanna Smit, p. 8.

57 Landman, Christina, The Piety of Afrikaans Women: Diaria of Guilt (Pretoria, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Landman’s, response to her critics: ‘Responses to The Piety of Afrikaans Women’, Religion and Theology, 2 (1995), pp. 33442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Coetzee, ‘Mission accomplished’, p. 11.

59 Landman, Digging up our Foremothers.

60 On the ordination of women to the priesthood, see Report of the Commission on the Ordination of Women (Church of the Province of Southern Africa, Cape Town, 1989).

61 Hulley, Leonard, Kretzschmar, Louise, and Pato, Luke, eds, Archbishop Tutu: Prophetic Witness in South Africa (Cape Town, 1996).Google Scholar

62 Denise M. Ackerman, ‘“For such a thing is not done in Israel”: violence against women’, ibid., pp. 145–55.

63 Caroline Tuckey, ‘Children, sexism and the Church’, ibid., pp. 156–70.

64 Ketshabile, ‘Challenges facing women in South Africa’, ibid., pp. 180–1.

65 Carmichael, ‘Creating newness: the spirituality of reconstruction’, ibid., pp. 182–98.

66 Beverley Haddad, ‘En-gendering a theology of development: raising some preliminary issues’, ibid., p. 199.

67 Ibid., p. 208.

68 Hodgson, ‘African and Anglican’, ibid., pp. 106–28.

69 Rampele, Mamphela, ‘On being Anglican: the pain and the privilege’, in England, Frank and Paterson, Torguil, eds, Bounty in Bondage: Essays in Honour of Edward King, Dean of Cape Town (Johannesburg, 1989), pp. 17790.Google Scholar

70 Ackermann, Denise, ‘Women, religion and culture: a feminist perspective on “freedom of religion”’, Missionalia, 22 (1994), p. 225.Google Scholar

71 Kretzschmar, Louise, ‘The relevance of feminist theology within the Southern African context’, in Ackermann, Denise, Draper, Jonathan A., Mashinini, Emma, eds, Women Hold up Half the Sky: Women in the Church in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 1991), pp. 10621 Google Scholar; Kretzschmar, Louise, ‘Women and culture: ecclesial and cultural transformation’, in Villa-Vicencio, Charles and Niehaus, Carl, eds, Many Cultures, One Nation: Festschrift for Beyers Naudé (Cape Town, 1995), pp. 90104.Google Scholar

72 Ackermann, Denise, ‘From “difference” to connectedness: a feminist view of the question of difference’, in Gruchy, J. W. de and Martin, S., eds, Religion and the Reconstruction of Civil Society (Pretoria, 1995), pp. 26172.Google Scholar

73 Ackermann et al, Women Hold Up Half the Sky.

74 See, for example, Denise Ackermann, ‘Being woman; being human’, in Ackermann et al., Women Hold Up Half the Sky, pp. 93–105.

75 Landman, Christina, ‘Ten years of feminist theology in South Africa’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 11 (1995), pp. 1445.Google Scholar

76 See Bennett, Bonita, ‘A critique on the role of women in the Church’, in Mosala, Itumeleng J. and Tlhagale, Buti, eds, The Unquestionable Right to be Free (Johannesburg, 1986), pp. 16974 Google Scholar; and Jordaan, Roxanne, ‘The emergence of black feminist theology in South Africa’, Journal of Black Theology in South Africa, 1 (1990), pp. 426.Google Scholar

77 Masenya, Madipoane J., ‘African womanist hermeneutics: a suppressed voice from South Africa speaks’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 11 (1995), pp. 14955.Google Scholar

78 Kuzwayo, Ellen, Call Me Woman (Johannesburg, 1985).Google Scholar

79 Ibid., pp. 227, 231 and 207.

80 See Dorothy Driver, ‘Women and voice in colonial discourse: self-representation in writing by black South African women’, paper presented at the Instutite of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, May 1989, pp. 16–19.

81 See Cuthbertson, Gregor and Whitelaw, David, God, Youth and Women: The YWCAs of Southern Africa 1886–1986 (Johannesburg, 1986), pp. 3540.Google Scholar

82 McCord, The Calling of Katie Makanya, p. 4.

83 See Maylam, Paul, ‘Tensions within the practice of history’, SAHJ, 33 (1995), pp. 312.Google Scholar