TY - JOUR
AU - Cabrita,, Joel
AB - Abstract Knowledge production in apartheid-era South Africa was a profoundly collaborative process. In particular, throughout the 1930s–1950s, the joint intellectual labor of both Africans and Europeans created a body of knowledge that codified and celebrated the notion of a distinct realm of Zulu religion. The intertwined careers of Swedish missionary to South Africa Bengt Sundkler and isiZulu-speaking Lutheran pastor-turned-ethnographer Titus Mthembu highlight the limitations of overly clear demarcations between “professional” versus “lay” anthropologists as well as between “colonial European” versus “indigenous African” knowledge. Mthembu and Sundkler’s decades-long collaboration resulted in a book called Bantu Prophets in South Africa ([1948] 1961). The work is best understood as the joint output of both men, although Sundkler scarcely acknowledged Mthembu’s role in the conceptualization, research, and writing of the book. In an era of racial segregation, the idea that African religion occupied a discrete, innately different sphere that the book advanced had significant political purchase. As one of a number of African ideologues supportive of the apartheid state, Mthembu mobilized his ethnographic findings to argue for innate racial difference and the virtues of “separate development” for South Africa’s Zulu community. His mysterious death in 1960 points to the high stakes of ethnographic research in the politically fraught climate of apartheid South Africa. South Africa, Bantu, Christianity, missionaries, apartheid, knowledge production Grey Street in 1950s Durban was a bustling center of commerce: Indian traders selling silk and other fabrics sat alongside African clerks’ offices, while Zulu “herbalists” created makeshift stalls for their eclectic medicines on the sidewalks. But at 318 Grey Street, one particular service was to be found. A stream of clients consulted Titus Mthembu (1915–1960), a former pastor of the Lutheran Mission in South Africa who had re-styled himself an expert of Zulu culture. Mthembu was an avid producer of ethnographic knowledge; he conducted fieldwork and interviews, collected objects, and authored unpublished reports on African religion, traditional chieftaincies, indigenous medicine, and Zulu handicrafts. Yet Mthembu did not have a single publication to his name. In fact, Mthembu’s legitimacy as an ethnographer stemmed almost entirely from his proximity to a book written by someone else. This was the celebrated account of Zulu Christianity, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (1948), authored by Lutheran missionary Bengt Sundkler, which argued that Zulu Christians imprinted their religious heritage on Christianity and created an indigenized “African” faith.1 This classic of African studies did not bear Mthembu’s name on its title page and, like most European-authored ethnographies of this period, scarcely mentioned its most significant African researcher. But other than the book’s primary author, Bengt Sundkler, Mthembu was the most important contributor to the work; he conducted fieldwork for Sundkler’s project over a twenty-year period, read drafts, wrote text, and significantly shaped the second edition (1961).2 Mthembu’s involvement with Bantu Prophets did not cease after its publication. Throughout the 1950s, Mthembu leveraged the text as part of his claim that he was an ethnographic expert of African tradition. This was the first decade of the apartheid state, a period when white officials categorized Black South Africans according to their membership in tribal constituencies characterized by supposedly immutable cultural, social, and linguistic values. The deployment of “Bantu” in Sundkler’s book title and many publications from this period became the shorthand for a political project that relied on the division of South African society into racial-ethnic encampments.3 While many Africans resisted such classifications and invoked universalistic non-racialism, others—many in isiZulu-speaking Natal and Zululand—found that white officials and anthropologists’ ethnic rhetoric complemented their own patriotic projects. As Africans debated the merits of a society organized along segregationist lines, written accounts of Zulu culture were sought out by readers seeking to bolster their theories of innate racial difference. Indigenous producers and purveyors of ethnographic knowledge like Mthembu dispensed their findings—often for profit—to clients eager to strategically position themselves within the racialized apartheid regime. Medicine men or herbalists, Zulu chiefs, and the region’s indigenous Christian churches came to Mthembu’s office seeking guidance from this authority of “traditional” custom. Authored by Sundkler and extensively mobilized by Mthembu, Bantu Prophets became Mthembu’s most well-worn manual for dispensing advice, an ethnographic sourcebook prescribing the making of tradition in an era of apartheid. Books like Bantu Prophets became a means through which Africans and Europeans investigated, wrote, read, and debated the significance of apartheid and negotiated what it meant to live according to racial difference. This essay argues that Africans succeeded in harnessing the production and dissemination of knowledge in a highly repressive period of South Africa’s history. It asserts that knowledge was often co-created by African and European interlocuters—including when ostensibly authored solely by a European; it also contends that Africans deployed their intellectual labor in novel ways, using techniques of textual interpretation and application that were unknown to their European collaborators. Many scholars have painted a much bleaker picture of knowledge production in the colonial era. Much work argues that European colonizers achieved domination not only through conquest, but also through knowledge. Based on insights derived from Foucault, scholars contend that colonial knowledge advanced through anthropology, religious studies, law, history, linguistics, and the natural sciences enabled the structures and dynamics of conquest by casting colonial subjects as racially and morally inferior, as people without histories, and as “primitive.”4 Early twentieth-century anthropology has been especially vulnerable to these accusations given its predilection for its classification of research subjects as members of essentialized unchanging “tribes.”5 These criticisms have been especially sharp in apartheid-era South Africa.6 The white state used scholarship that codified African culture to advocate for segregating Africans and, thus, “protecting” their cultural difference. Bantu Prophets undoubtedly fell within this tradition. Sundkler was close to Afrikaner government ethnologists, and his romantic portrayal of African religiosity resonated with the conservative racial policies of his own Lutheran mission and the apartheid state.7 Yet the intertwined stories of Mthembu, Sundkler, and Bantu Prophets remind us that not all colonial knowledge was produced to the detriment of colonized peoples and that even the most essentializing scholarship could be re-purposed for African agendas. Recently, there have been many useful calls to “decolonize” European scholarship on the African continent and invest in the production of more authentically African knowledge.8 But Mthembu’s life demonstrates that throughout the twentieth century and at the height of white rule in South Africa, ordinary Africans were already decolonizing knowledge. Moreover, even the most seemingly European scholarship bore the imprint of African interlocuters. This assertion resonates with recent research that has drawn attention to how colonial subjects participated in the creation of knowledge about themselves. Far from offering descriptions of passive informants providing raw data to colonial intellectuals, newer scholarship argues that indigenous collaborators extensively shaped knowledge production.9 A growing number of studies assert the significance of research assistants, translators, and intermediaries who conducted interviews, provided linguistic help, and wrote text for celebrated professional scholars.10 However, while pointing out the complex provenance of colonial knowledge, this notion of a “research assistant” does not capture the complexity of Mthembu’s role in the publication of Bantu Prophets or his broader career. For one, the entrepreneurial Mthembu became increasingly autonomous from Sundkler, making the role of assistant an unnecessarily restrictive prism through which to view his activities. Furthermore, given Sundkler’s own insecure professional status—he was a self-taught amateur ethnographer—it is difficult to consider this a relationship between a senior expert and a junior novice. Mthembu’s career, however, demonstrates how financial constraints and lack of access to scholarly networks often meant African ethnographers were blocked from publishing. While a few Zulu intellectuals did succeed in disseminating solo-authored ethnographies, histories, and folkloric texts, Mthembu was obliged to assume the role of assistant to his European counterpart, using the latter’s publication as a platform for his own ambitions.11 There are more ways in which Mthembu’s long involvement with Sundkler and Bantu Prophets expands our understanding of the power dynamics underpinning knowledge production in twentieth-century Africa. Beyond demonstrating that a renowned anthropologist’s work was shaped by an unacknowledged assistant, Mthembu’s story also reveals how African collaborators subsequently used these published texts. In South Africa, as elsewhere across the continent, African intellectuals continued to refashion and repurpose this knowledge long after their contracts as research assistants ended. Building on Derek Peterson’s notion of the “ethnic patriot,” this article casts Mthembu and his compatriots as architects of a still little-understood strand of South African politics, one that opposed the African National Congress’s multi-racial universalism.12 Mthembu and his peers appealed to the past, a territorially defined homeland, and the linguistic and cultural unity of the Zulu people; they also often espoused an ugly and virulent anti-Indianism. In the politically charged environment of 1950s Natal and Zululand, ethnographies as well as histories, novels, plays, poems, and newspaper articles codifying racial difference became particularly salient.13 There was the work produced by the Zulu Cultural Society, the writers for the isiZulu newspaper Ilanga lase Natal, the contributors to the Natal Native Teachers’ Journal, and the poems of Zulu nationalist B. W. Vilakazi.14 Across the continent, comparable figures wrote and circulated ethnography, history, folklore, and religious studies in order to stage debates against colonialism and argue for the legitimacy of newly minted postcolonial states. We can detect these impulses in Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnography of the Kikuyu, and particularly in his argument for a harmonious integrated culture deserving of independence from Britain. Similarly, in the 1960s, Uganda-based scholar John Mbiti wrote of “African religion” as seamlessly integrating sacred and secular; his work was cited by controversial nationalist leader Idi Amin.15 In South Africa, intellectuals like Mthembu wrote, sold, and promoted ethnographies of “traditional” culture to stake out distinctive political positions: to oppose the non-racialism of the African National Congress and carve out a space within the constraints of apartheid legislation. The following story, thus, illuminates the limitations of the old bifurcation between resistance and collaboration in South African historiography.16 Both scholarship and popular imagination juxtapose heroic figures who engaged in protest versus the state against the “traitorous” Africans who collaborated with officials. But to cast all mid-twentieth-century Africans as either the principled opponents of apartheid or amoral turncoats obscures the complex motivations of mid-century ethnographers like Mthembu who sensed an opportunity in the official shift toward the codification of Bantu culture. In this respect, the current article builds on revisionist scholarship probing the hitherto untold stories of Africans who formed alliances with apartheid officials.17 Mthembu’s life highlights the internal diversity of South Africa’s Black society in the 1950s, and it reveals the lack of consensus surrounding resistance to apartheid and the alternative political visions that inspired Africans, especially in Natal and Zululand. Against this complex backdrop, our certainty regarding what constitutes decolonized versus colonized knowledge begins to look less secure, as does our bifurcation of African history into those who oppressed versus those who resisted. Rather than conveying a story of racialized knowledge repressively imposed by the state onto unwilling Africans, the history of Bantu Prophets demonstrates that both Africans and Europeans could collaborate in the formation of ideologies that sustained racial difference. The project of “writing apartheid” involved multiple authors, divergent readerships, and a variety of trajectories. This is a fine-grained account of the politics of knowledge production in twentieth-century Africa, and the collaborations—between Africans and Europeans, colonizer and colonized, professional and popular ethnographers, authors and their assistants—that produced such knowledge. Unsettling any simplistic conflation between colonial knowledge and white domination as well as rendering the line between European and African intellectual work ever-more difficult to locate, Mthembu’s career demonstrates how the usual subjects of anthropology were themselves doing the labor of ethnography, codifying, editing, and representing cultural knowledge to debate the implications of segregation and mobilize readers around new identities. By conducting fieldwork and writing up results in cooperation with white academics (who had their own reasons to invest in reified racial identities), intellectuals like Mthembu created manuals for a Black identity organized along ethnic lines. These texts promised to regulate diverse readerships by providing reassuring accounts of stable “Bantu” identities moored in history and custom. In the context of a racist society willing to reward Africans who invested in their “Bantu” identity, albeit in limited ways, Black intellectuals became skilled at using ethnographic techniques to frame their political arguments. The manner in which intellectuals mobilized ethnography, moreover, continually fluctuated. Such shifts are exemplified by Mthembu, who, as a younger man, had initially deployed ethnography as a moralistic mode of correcting, rather than celebrating, Christian “neo-paganism.” Titus Mthembu belonged to a small class of early twentieth-century elite Africans (amakholwa, “the believers”) who prized Christianity and Western-style progress. Although its members felt their origins were in “backwards heathendom,” they were confident their destiny was equality with civilized progressives of all races. Titus was born in 1915, and his family—his father was A. W. Mthembu—were members of the Cooperating Lutheran Mission, one of South Africa’s largest Christian organizations.18 The Mthembu family resided in the Norwegian Lutheran Mission Station of Empangeni in Natal; the mission was particularly active in the region and boasted ninety thousand Zulu members.19 As was typical for literate Christian Africans, the Mthembu family emphasized education, guided as they were by the belief that reading and writing were the key to attaining equality with whites. Mthembu attended the Lutheran school in Empangeni up to Standard 6 (or eighth grade in the U.S.), and in 1933, he was sent to the Lutheran Teachers’ Training Institute at Mapumulo, which was a common career path for the small Black middle class.20 Like many amakholwa who faced impoverishment, Mthembu’s parents were unable to afford his tuition fees, so an older brother supported him until he left the institute to teach primary school students in 1937.21 Mthembu was an indifferent student who barely scraped by with a pass in most subjects. His teachers deemed him merely “satisfactory” and—hinting at Mthembu’s future subversive relationship with the mission—“very unresponsive and dreamy.”22 But the institute’s emphasis on the uplifting effects of education (its teachers viewed learning as crucial for “the moral and intellectual development of our Christian natives”) convinced Mthembu of his place among a Black Lutheran elite guided by the color-blind values of civilized progressives.23 Saturday nights at the institute were devoted to debates on topics like how to be “polite gentlemen,” the “value of reading books,” and the “necessity of punctuality and good manners.”24 By 1938, after only one year of teaching, the twenty-three-year-old Mthembu enrolled in the Lutheran seminary Oscarsberg, in Rorke’s Drift (Eshiyane), outside of Dundee in Natal. He was to start the four-year course toward ordination as a Lutheran minister, which would prepare him to join the ranks of the fifty or so African priests who ministered in 1930s South Africa.25 Mthembu had struggled with the poor pay African teachers received, finding it “difficult to pay rent from [his] hard-earned salary which has to suffice for so many of the needs of civilization and higher standard of living.”26 Hoping the ministry would provide a better means of support, Mthembu found a cohort of sixteen other Zulu students at Oscarsberg, most of whom had been teachers.27 Although Mthembu’s cohort was deemed unusually advanced—the principal praised “their great interest in their studies and their earnest efforts”—Mthembu himself continued to perform poorly and was second-to-bottom of the class in 1940.28 But Oscarsberg was nonetheless a formative experience for Mthembu. As with Mapumulo, Oscarsberg taught Mthembu his place among a class of African progressives who had more in common with educated Europeans than their “heathen” Zulu compatriots. The seminary’s lively Literary Society, in which Mthembu was a regular participant, debated topics like whether “the African of today is more fortunate than his great-grandfather” (the answer was yes) and whether “the custom of lobola [bridewealth payments] should be done away with” (also yes).29 Oscarsberg was also where Mthembu began his apprenticeship as a novice ethnographer. In this position, he finally found the activity that would spark his considerable intellectual curiosity and passion. In 1941, one of the seminary’s teachers became seriously ill. A young Swedish Lutheran priest, Rev. Dr. Bengt Sundkler, was summoned from rural Zululand as an emergency replacement to teach Mthembu and his classmates church history.30 Having recently finished his doctorate in Uppsala on the Church of Sweden’s missionary work, Sundkler first arrived in South Africa several years earlier, in 1937, to take up a post that fulfilled his lifelong dream to travel to Africa, which he had imagined since childhood as a continent of “interest and allure.”31 Sundkler hoped to teach ordinands at Oscarsberg, but on account of his theology, which was deemed suspiciously liberal by the mission, he was instead sent to Ceza, a remote medical mission.32 Now fortuitously at Oscarsberg, a period Sundkler later called his “ten happy weeks” in South Africa, he established himself as an advocate for African students, frequently writing to the mission to complain about their scanty advancement opportunities.33 Sundkler formed an especially close bond with Mthembu, whom he later recalled became an “excellent friend.”34 Sundkler acted as a mentor to the young ordinand and even gave him a generous monetary gift for his wedding; in response, Mthembu wrote effusively of his gratitude “for [Sundkler’s] sympathy which springs from a truly experienced Christian heart.”35 Sundkler’s greatest impact upon the young Mthembu, however, was in the realm of ethnographic research. Since 1938, Sundkler had been conducting fieldwork on the so-called independent churches, also known as the “separatists” or “sects.” By the 1930s, these had become a major feature of the country’s religious landscape, and they were especially concentrated in Natal. These churches were Black-led organizations that had progressively broken away from white European missionary oversight starting in the early decades of the twentieth century. While many were inspired by ethno-nationalist visions of African self-determination, others were shaped by North American Holiness-Evangelical theology, which stressed faith healing, speaking in tongues, and ecstatic prophesying (this led to their characteristic leadership form: the visionary “prophet”). A North American church known as Zion became particularly successful, and this led many groups to incorporate “Zion” or “Zionist” into their nomenclature. Moreover, in some of these separatist churches, the emphasis on African leadership also implied the promotion of indigenous cultural practices. For example, in certain churches communication with ancestors via faith healing was common, as was the sanction of polygamous marriages according to the traditional Zulu pattern.36 Both Black and white Lutherans were deeply concerned at this invocation of Zulu tradition. On the one hand, it is true that of all the mission societies active in South Africa, Lutheranism—with its Northern European commitment to the ethno-national volk—permitted converts to practice their faith in a manner that resonated with their ethnic identities.37 Indeed, Swedish Lutheran missionaries had pioneered Zulu translations of the Bible.38 On the other hand, missionaries and African converts were highly selective in determining which Zulu traditions accorded with “progressive” Christianity. The mission maintained that adults seeking baptism should “reject polygamy, ancestor worship, be married only by Christian rites, and [condemn] lobola, smelling out sorcerers and consulting witchdoctors.”39 Aspiring to gain a foothold within a fraternity of Christian progressives, Zulu converts reiterated this largely unforgiving view of African culture. In 1929, the mission’s African pastors had resolved “re Zulu customs … what was valuable in the old customs should be preserved but everything else put away.”40 Lutherans, both Black and white, worried that independent Black-led churches displayed “pagan” tendencies. A 1932 commission investigated the phenomenon and gave horrified accounts of neo-traditionalist churches like the small Abaprofeti [the Prophets] Zion Church, which “is quick in sacrificing a goat to ask ancestors to be merciful,” as well as the large isiZulu-speaking Nazaretha church (with thirty-five thousand members) in which, lamentably, “heathen dances play an essential part.” European missionaries condemned these African Christians’ difficulties in renouncing their old ways: “separatists form a syncretism of Christianity and heathendom, fulfilling the desire of being Christian but not parting with old customs.”41 African pastors likewise concluded these “half-heathen denomination[s] … harm the teaching of the gospel.”42 Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Sundkler and his wife, Ingeborg, as language students in South Africa, 1938, from Marja Liisa Swantz, Beyond the Forestline: The Life and Letters of Bengt Sundkler (Leominster, 2002), n.p. Reproduced with permission from Gracewing Publishers. Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Sundkler and his wife, Ingeborg, as language students in South Africa, 1938, from Marja Liisa Swantz, Beyond the Forestline: The Life and Letters of Bengt Sundkler (Leominster, 2002), n.p. Reproduced with permission from Gracewing Publishers. Sundkler, however, formed a different impression of these churches. More theologically liberal than the majority of his colleagues, Sundkler felt African Christians should worship God in culturally authentic ways and was convinced these organizations yielded missiological insights into indigenous Christianity—what “the African … when left to himself, considers essential in the Christian faith.”43 Sundkler was also influenced by volkekunde, a contemporary school of Afrikaner anthropology characterized by its ardent admiration for African cultures.44 While at Ceza, Sundkler encountered Hans Holleman, a Dutch–South African anthropologist researching Zulu customary law and a proponent of volkekunde anthropology.45 Holleman—from whom Sundkler learned “how a well-trained social anthropologist handles his study”—was inclined to view Africans in terms of ahistorical “tribal” identities.46 It was also under Holleman’s influence that Sundkler came to conceive of Africans in essentialized ahistorical terms: the “[Zulu] tribe [was] characterized by distinct cultural, religious, and political values.”47 But Sundkler’s sympathy for the romanticized theories of volkekundiges did not mean he wholeheartedly embraced these churches’ promotion of indigeneity. His position was that local cultural specificity should coexist with a global Christianity that transcended regional variation.48 In this respect, Sundkler was also influenced by South Africa’s Anglophone tradition of social anthropology, which stressed the coexistence of different racial groups within a single society.49 Sundkler avidly read Monica Hunter’s renowned Reaction to Conquest, a book that explained how modern African societies became incorporated into a European labor market.50 By 1939, Sundkler was regularly visiting Johannesburg to attend the ethnographic seminars of Audrey Richards, training that impressed upon him the limited utility of ahistorical ethnic identities and the importance of social change.51 Thus, Richards reminded Sundkler that he “[would] see very little of the old native life round here but you [could] on the other hand see a lot of big locations and mine compounds [where urban Africans lived].”52 Influenced by both these schools of social anthropology, Sundkler aimed to conduct an ethnographic study of independent churches that balanced his appreciation of local cultural specificity (the volkekunde emphasis) with his commitment to Christian universalism (more aligned with the Anglophone social anthropology tradition). However, Sundkler’s knowledge of isiZulu was in its infancy, his priestly commitments were full time, and in 1942 he was posted to Tanganyika.53 To this end, Sundkler decided to recruit Mthembu and his Oscarsberg classmates as research assistants. While his elderly African congregants at Ceza expressed disapproval at their new pastor’s interest in “pagan” churches, Sundkler found Mthembu willing to assist his much-admired teacher.54 Sundkler had already used his time teaching at Oscarsberg to introduce his students to the independent churches “in order to bring the subject of Church History closer to reality,” and he had been delighted at their lively response, particularly that of Mthembu, who defended the “sects” in his end-of-term examination, pithily maintaining that “the one who calls others a sect, is a sect unto himself.”55 This was a decade when mission-educated Zulu displayed a growing interest in recording the customs of their compatriots as both a celebration of African tradition and a negotiation about which aspects were compatible with a trajectory toward “modernization.” Mission presses like Mariannhill outside Pietermaritzburg and Lovedale in the Eastern Cape published folklore, chiefly histories, historical novels, and oral traditions that evinced a blend of approbation and censure for African culture.56 Capitalizing on this enthusiasm for “social research,” Sundkler proposed to Mthembu and ten others that “if I paid them a little bit of salary, they [would] spend their month of holiday going about doing interviews among the prophets.”57 Sundkler was no professional ethnographer; he had only recently become familiar with these techniques through Richards’s seminars. Nonetheless, he now offered basic ethnographic training to Mthembu and others; he supplied them with a questionnaire and notebook and requested that they “take observations as thorough and accurate as possible.” He instructed the group to vigilantly seek out material “whenever you come across something interesting, write it in the notebook” and to be constantly open to opportunities: “Have you thought that your nearest neighbour has got experience of these matters?” Reflecting current methods in British social anthropology—vernacular languages, participant-observation fieldwork, and immediate reporting—he requested they “make the notes in Zulu and immediately after the interview.”58 Despite (or perhaps because of) this rudimentary training, Mthembu found research challenging. Not least, there was the problem of time. Most of these newly qualified pastors were burdened with heavy ministerial obligations to their congregations. Mthembu was posted to Ekombe Mission Station in Zululand, where he oversaw nineteen outstations.59 He confessed to Sundkler that although “I have written a few things and hope to continue, it was proving impossible to do more.”60 Traversing Natal to seek out independent church leaders was also physically demanding. In 1944, Kilburn Msomi, Mthembu’s classmate who also conducted research for Sundkler, had to travel by foot after his bicycle broke.61 He found “the country here is very hard” and “my boots were [now] fast getting worn out.”62 Researchers faced hostility from independent ministers more accustomed to African pastors’ antagonism than their interested inquiries. Instructed by Sundkler to focus on the Nazaretha church, Mthembu found its members “very suspicious … when I took out the book to write, they were then unwilling to say anything more.” On one occasion, he had his fieldnotes confiscated and was accused of attempting “sorcery” with his undecipherable notebook (surely also a comment on how uneducated independent church leaders perceived these elite African clerics).63 Mthembu and others continually doubted whether they had understood the precepts of ethnographic research. One of Mthembu’s Oscarsberg classmates, P. B. Mhlungu, wondered to Sundkler whether “my reports will show all that is required by you,” while another researcher, William Mabaso, begged “may you please Mfundisi [Pastor], give me some hints on which I can base my investigation?”64 Most challenging of all was the subject matter. Despite his defense of the “sects” in his end-of-year exam, Mthembu was deeply disconcerted to discover their “pagan” ways. The Nazaretha church near Durban was renowned for its neo-traditionalist incorporation of ancestral worship, and Mthembu’s letters to Sundkler disapprovingly cast Nazaretha practices as practically occultic, plying the Swedish missionary with reports of how the deceased founder of the church (Isaiah Shembe) exerted influence through a prophetic medium figure channeling his spirit.65 Although Mthembu found that the experience of research revised his prejudices about the “wild” ways of some independent churches (he wrote to Sundkler: “some of the [sects] I have begun to respect very much”), he starkly drew the line at the “occultism” of the Nazaretha: “I don’t think I shall ever respect Shembeism.”66 As well as lambasting their incorporation of traditional religious practices, Mthembu also disparaged these churches for their low “moral standards,” detailing how they encouraged loose morals (a charge linked to their all-night prayer meetings), and he used his fieldnotes to cast church leaders as sexual degenerates because of their continued sanction of polygamy. One report, which undoubtedly contained some exaggeration, noted to Sundkler that “all the leaders of the sects have been in gaol” for sexual misconduct among their female followers.67 Despite these obstacles, Mthembu and the others persevered. Mthembu was the most prolific, producing 150 hand-written pages of interviews, notes on church services, and biographies of religious leaders.68 Payment was an enticement to continue, and at least one researcher, P. B. Mhlungu, confessed to Sundkler he was “badly in need of money.”69 For Mthembu, however, collaborating with Sundkler provided more than monetary compensation. Mthembu viewed ethnographic investigation as the solution to what he labeled “the sects problem.” He defined the independent churches and their lapse into paganism, which he had charted in such detail for Sundkler, as a pressing issue of national importance that threatened to compromise the true church and the progressive uplift of Black people.70 Through its thick descriptions of everyday practices, Mthembu considered ethnographic writing as performing a morally corrective role: detailed accounts of pagan religious practice illuminated error and thereby cleared the way for the penitent to return to true Christianity, which was conceived of as the same faith promoted by the Lutheran missionary. As Mthembu confessed to Sundkler after submitting one particularly lurid account of Nazaretha “occultism,” “I’m filled with gratitude and admiration for your most useful and patriotic undertaking.”71 P. B. Mhlungu similarly expressed appreciation for the remedial role of ethnography in his priestly ministry and thanked Sundkler for “so helpful and practical a study as [that of] the sects.”72 Sundkler’s Bantu Prophets, which was published in 1948, clearly betrayed the diverse perspectives that shaped the book.73 In keeping with his romanticized attachment to Zulu culture, Sundkler’s evaluation of the independent churches was not entirely negative. He argued they were an “important intimation of the true interpretatio Africana of the Christian message,” and several reviewers commented on his sympathetic tone, deeming it unusual for a missionary.74 Furthermore, signaling his indebtedness to volkekunde ethnography, the book’s title had been suggested to Sundkler by N. J. Van Warmelo, an Afrikaner ethnologist for the South African government’s Native Affairs Department (NAD) famous for his nostalgic portrayals of timeless tribes.75 This was a period when Afrikaner ideologues increasingly favored the term “Bantu” for its purported scientific utility in classifying Africans as racially other. Many Africans, too, debated the respective merits of “Native” (largely rejected as pejorative) versus “Bantu” (much preferred for its supposed factual neutrality) or even “African.”76 As Sundkler reasoned, “the word ‘Native’ is not liked by the Africans,” and so he opted for the more fashionable “Bantu.”77 But despite Sundkler’s proximity to ideologies that essentialized racial difference, the book’s overall message was a robust denunciation of independent churches’ “syncretism.” In this respect, Sundkler revealed his allegiance to a very different strand of his Lutheran heritage: its commitment to a universalistic society of Christian modernity that transcended race. This was the same emphasis of the Anglophone social anthropology school of Audrey Richards in which he had immersed himself years before. As Sundkler put it, “the pull from this heathen heritage … constitutes an ever-present problem.”78 In a famous passage that used italics to underscore “the seriousness of the whole situation,” Sundkler concluded that “the syncretistic sect becomes the bridge over which Africans are brought back to heathenism.”79 In formulating this argument, Sundkler was profoundly influenced by his African Lutheran researchers. The book was nearly silent on Mthembu and others’ contributions.80 Yet sections of Sundkler’s prose incorporated their ethnographic material almost word-for-word, including their critical accounts of “neo-paganism.”81 Sundkler, moreover, sent the manuscript to several influential African Lutherans for comments, and their perspectives also shaped his assessment. Bantu Prophets’ discussion of “New Wine in Old Wineskins,” through which Sundkler criticized these churches for taking “the Bantu heritage as the standard by which to judge of Bible interpretation,” closely echoed comments made by the leading African Lutheran Charles Mpanza.82 Mpanza wrote to Sundkler that he considered the “tragedy” of the independent churches that “they consider the Bible supports and establishes the old Bantu pattern.”83 However, developments over the next decade would radically alter the views of Sundkler, Mthembu, and a broader swath of Zulu intellectuals including Mpanza. In the dawning age of apartheid, and as a result of the diminishing confidence in non-racial Christianity, Mthembu came to view ethnographic production as a means to celebrate rather than correct the neo-traditionalist independent churches. The ascent of the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist Party in 1948 marked a new phase in the government’s promotion of “separate development,” or apartheid. Politicians like Hendrik Verwoerd justified this by invoking racial essences—partly informed by volkekunde anthropological theories—and argued that apartheid revitalized “Bantu” culture.84 Vehement criticism arose. The African National Congress (ANC) mounted public displays of opposition and attempted to repudiate segregationist logic by forging a multi-racial alliance of Africans, Europeans, and Indians.85 The ANC was never unified, however, in its insistence on non-racialism, and especially in Natal and Zululand, with their long histories of ethnic mobilization, cracks began to appear in this alliance. Moreover, a number of conservative ethnically oriented political parties sprang up throughout Natal during this period, such as S. S. Bhengu’s Bantu National Congress and Walter Dimba’s Zulu National Party.86 It was during this time that Mthembu would gain a new appreciation for the independent churches, and the notion of catering to “Bantu” religiosity resonated with African elites’ growing conviction that Black progress might be better aided by segregation rather than racial integration. Thus as the 1940s progressed, Mthembu was one of many African Lutherans who became dissatisfied with the hypocrisy of the supposedly non-racial mission. Despite the college’s ambitions to create African progressives, Mthembu’s Oscarsberg years were filled with contradictions. Many teachers felt that however talented, ordinands possessed “deficiencies innate to the race, an inability to concentrate and reason for themselves.”87 Racial hierarchies structured all aspects of Oscarsberg. It was expected, for example, that African students would enter European teachers’ houses through the kitchen door.88 And although Lutherans’ official goal was a national church under African leadership, it would only be in 1972 that the first Black bishop—Mthembu’s fellow researcher P. B. Mhlungu—was appointed.89 Moreover, by the 1940s, not only were Zulu pastors rarely appointed to senior positions; they were also unable to access benefits that were similar to those of their white colleagues, including salaries, car allowances, and pension plans.90 Black pastors called for justice. At a Lutheran synod in 1945, Zulu pastor M. J. Mzobe proclaimed, “We would not be very happy if the Mother Church sends out new missionaries because this would hinder Zulu pastors.”91 In keeping with this mood of discontent, by the end of the decade, Mthembu was one of several African pastors who separated from the mission.92 Mthembu had increasingly clashed with missionaries who claimed “he went about too much,” an allusion to their difficulties controlling his activities.93 In 1949, the mission dismissed Mthembu, accusing him of theft and the more nebulous charge of arrogance by claiming that, “although gifted, [Mthembu’s] hat was too small for his head.”94 Disillusioned with Lutheran pretensions to non-racialism, Mthembu revised his opinion of the traditionalist independent churches and even linked himself with Job Chiliza’s popular African Gospel Church.95 After Mthembu’s dismissal from the mission, and doubtless drawing on ethnographic skills he learned from Sundkler, he now developed an ardent interest in Zulu culture. He began a correspondence with the famous Durban ethnographic curator Killie Campbell, to whom he sent written material on chieftaincy and local customs.96 Severely cash-strapped since his break with the mission, Mthembu realized that promoting Zulu tradition could have practical benefits. In the early 1950s, he started a small business procuring and selling “native craft work,” including “wood work and clay pots,”97 and began practicing as an “herbalist,” a mid-century take on the inyanga who dispensed curative plants.98 Moreover, Mthembu now considered religious segmentation along racial lines divinely ordained: “God separated races [and] gave each race its own Colour, Culture, Social Activities and Religion.”99 His conception of salvation shifted away from Lutheran universalism to the conviction that African pastors should work for the redemption of their Black brethren; as he declared to Sundkler, “May God send us more Bhengus, more Chilizas, more Mthembus for the salvation of Africa!”100 While many of Natal’s Zulu Christian intelligentsia previously bemoaned the independent churches’ “traditionalism,” now African mission elites viewed these organizations as consonant with cultural-ethnic patriotism. As Mthembu’s Oscarsberg classmate Kilburn Msomi put it, “There is a change in the attitude towards these churches … people are of the opinion that the older churches started by missionaries should be more friendly towards the separatist churches.”101 In making moves such as these, Mthembu was influenced by the broader “ethnic” turn of this period, whereby mission-educated elites gravitated toward a patriotism characterized by admiration for Zulu culture and history.102 Mthembu was one of these many middle-class Africans in Natal and Zululand who considered apartheid a viable route to Black development.103 He reasoned that segregation removed from Africans the need to unfairly compete with Europeans: “Separation will help each race to develop in its own area according to its capabilities … prosperity, happiness, absence of clashes between races will develop.”104 Mthembu, furthermore, viewed segregation as a means to preserve an African culture threatened by European encroachment. As he argued to a meeting of African teachers in 1954, “It would be a crime to compel the Bantu to adopt European Culture.”105 Also like many Zulu intellectuals of the period, Mthembu held a vituperative hatred of Indians, viewing Durban’s anti-Indian riots of 1949 as evidence that “the races should be separated, [Indians] have their home in India and are at liberty to leave South Africa.” In Mthembu’s eyes, the ANC’s multi-racial alliance was an affront to Bantu racial pride: “Those who object to Apartheid, some of them want to fall in love with Native girls and get coloured children, whereas in Apartheid each race will keep pure.”106 Enthused by segregation’s racially purifying effects, Mthembu vocally defended apartheid to its many critics. In 1953, like many prominent Zulu intellectuals of this period, Mthembu initiated contact with the increasingly powerful NAD—the institution charged with implementing segregationist legislation—and offered his services as a figure well connected to traditional elites, claiming personal knowledge of “nearly all the chiefs from the Indian Ocean to the Drakensberg mountains.”107 Officials responded enthusiastically to Mthembu’s initial letters to them, noting he was “not shy to defend Afrikaner and apartheid policy.”108 Capitalizing on the knowledge of Zulu chiefs he developed through his ethnographic research for Killie Campbell, one of Mthembu’s first roles was to garner support among Zulu chiefs for the Bantu Authorities Act. This legislation, an early lynchpin of the government’s policy of separate development, formalized “tribal” leadership organized along ethnic lines in the rural areas.109 Mthembu also infiltrated ANC meetings; as he later boasted: “I have exposed myself to all government enemies—Bantu and Indian agitators—just to tell them the true voice of the Government.”110 On several occasions, Mthembu used his Lutheran connections to report on mission synod meetings, investigating whether “propaganda and agitation” were afoot.111 Mthembu even founded a short-lived political party, the Council for the Zulus in Natal, which, he reassured the government, counted “no English people, Indians or coloureds” among its members and which “combat[ed] Congress and Communism.”112 Mthembu came to see ethnographic texts as important polemical resources. Other pro-apartheid Zulu intellectuals of this period similarly recognized the power of the written word, including, but not limited to, ethnography. R. R. R. Dhlomo, editor of Ilanga lase Natal, frequently penned pro-apartheid editorials, and writer C. S. Nyembezi lent ethnographic support to the notion of a separate Zulu polity in his collections of Zulu proverbs.113 Recognizing texts’ usefulness, Mthembu deplored ANC agents’ skill in mobilizing documents to support their program, as he witnessed activists distributing anti-government “circulars and papers” within factories and urban compounds.114 For its part, the NAD recognized the value of circulating pro-apartheid publications to teachers, ministers, and other Black professionals in the hopes that these texts “will be of great assistance to [them] in [their] great work of creating goodwill” in their communities.115 Concurring, Mthembu requested officials supply him with magazines to circulate, such as the NAD’s official publication Bantoe, as well as Bantu Education: Oppression or Opportunity and the polemical tract What Is Communism?, the publication issued by SABRA (South African Bureau of Racial Affairs), the government’s intellectual powerhouse.116 But Mthembu was particularly cognizant of the utility of ethnographic texts. Drawing on his fieldwork for Sundkler, Mthembu now planned to write his own account of the “Bantu Churches.” He conceived of the project as both a denunciation of European missions, which he cast as repressive to Black progress, and a celebration of the culturally “authentic” independent churches. In the 1940s, Mthembu viewed ethnography as a corrective discipline, a mode to illuminate and repair the errors of “traditionalism.” But in the pro-ethnicity mood of 1950s Natal and Zululand, ethnographic descriptions of “tribal” practices now had a different meaning. Scholarly codifications of indigenous customs not only legitimized “Bantu culture” but also implicitly rebuked those, ANC activists most of all, who sought to transcend tribalism. Mthembu’s aim was to widely distribute the text—he planned to make it freely available—and thereby intervene in what he called “the great political struggle going on here.”117 By the mid-1950s, Mthembu had written his “Zulu book about the work of Churches in South Africa,” an ethnographic celebration of indigenous religiosity entitled Voice of the Zulu.118 But the book was never released. In 1956, Mthembu lamented to Sundkler, “I am unable to publish because I did not have people behind me … I am doing this of my own.”119 Mthembu knew that given his hostile tone, he could not count on mission churches: “I do not blame the missions for failing me, they are facing bitter blows in their work.”120 He had hoped the NAD would support publication as part of their push for “Bantu development” but was informed no financial support would be forthcoming.121 For Mthembu, Sundkler’s return to South Africa for research for a second edition of Bantu Prophets in 1958 signaled a welcome opportunity to harness ethnography for the segregationist cause.122 Over the years, Sundkler himself had become more supportive of the notion of an innate African religiosity. In 1948, he became the research secretary of the International Missionary Council, a position that involved extensive travel across Africa, including to newly independent Ghana in 1958.123 Visiting the continent at the end of the colonial period underscored the swiftly shifting balance of power between European missionaries and African Christians; this alerted Sundkler to the necessity of “translat[ing] the Gospel into generous and rich African terms of expression.”124 Sundkler’s appreciation for “African terms of expression” shared unexpected affinities with segregationists’ promotion of tribalism. Newly arrived in South Africa, he sought an affiliation with his old friend Hans Holleman’s Institute for Social Research in Durban, an organization linked to SABRA.125 Sundkler, to be clear, was a self-proclaimed liberal and was far from supportive of apartheid.126 At the same time, Sundkler was no political radical. He possessed an intense fear of communism, and his celebration of Bantu prophets as intrinsically different from European Christians stood uncomfortably close to apartheid rhetoric.127 Apartheid officials, thus, discerned much value in Sundkler’s research. While in the 1920s the government had repressively regulated Black-led churches, by the 1950s, officials noted the utility of Bantu Christianity in countering Anglophone missions’ racial integration.128 In 1934, volkekunde anthropologist Werner Eiselen criticized the independent churches as “the sorry spectacle of Protestantism running riot.”129 But by 1953, Eiselen, now the head of the NAD, stated his “Department favours independence of Bantu Churches from European control.”130 Recognizing the value of ethnographic research on Bantu Christianity, NAD officials went out of their way to assist Sundkler; they allowed him to study departmental papers on these churches, circulated his questionnaires, and forwarded him relevant articles on “Bantu Churches.”131 Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Sundkler, Uppsala, 1957. Reproduced with permission from Upplandsmuseet, Uppsala, Sweden. Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Sundkler, Uppsala, 1957. Reproduced with permission from Upplandsmuseet, Uppsala, Sweden. Mthembu also recognized the value of a new edition of Bantu Prophets. When Sundkler contacted Mthembu in 1957 for research assistance, the latter quickly agreed. But Mthembu was no longer the docile student assistant of old; he already chastised Sundkler for insufficiently recognizing his contribution to the first edition: “I hope you still remember the work we did in writing Bantu Prophets. Yet you did not send me a copy, I feel you forgot … please send me two copies.”132 Mthembu now considered himself an accomplished ethnographer with his own research projects to consider. Throughout 1958, Sundkler found Mthembu difficult to track down, plaintively asking, “When are you going to send me a letter again, my friend? Don’t give me up.”133 Moreover, Mthembu was not above redirecting Sundkler’s resources to his own research. In 1959, Mthembu “absconded with an expensive electronic flash apparatus” lent to him by Holleman in order to take pictures of an independent church in which he was particularly interested.134 The newly confident Mthembu even suggested fresh research topics. Ever alert to threats to Bantu purity, Mthembu felt that Durban’s community of East African Muslims urgently required investigation. By 1958, he was visiting Durban’s amaKhuwa population (liberated Zanzibari slaves who settled there in the nineteenth century) and even hired his own research assistant who also taught him Swahili.135 Gathering pamphlets on Muslims’ activities in Durban, Mthembu especially worried that there did not seem to “be a colour bar in Islam.”136 Ethnographic research, Mthembu informed Sundkler, would reveal the dangers of this community that he saw as an affront to the racial purity of the Bantu as well as “communists … dangerous to the state.”137 While his recommendations that Sundkler investigate the Muslim “threat” went ignored (judging from the topic’s absence in Sundkler’s publications), Mthembu did succeed in shaping the second edition’s newly positive estimation of Bantu Christianity.138 For one, Mthembu ensured that Sundkler interviewed pro-apartheid independent church leaders who argued that Black religiosity was best kept isolated from European contamination. There was, for example, the Zulu religious leader who told Sundkler in an interview organized by Mthembu that “each nation maybe has to have its own God … the only one who could bring about a change in our situation would be a great Bantu prophet.”139 Mthembu himself repeatedly railed to Sundkler about the dangers of a racially integrated Christianity, maintaining that Europeans would stifle “Bantu” faith, and he supplied Sundkler with evidence of “native pastors who state they are denied work, all is in the hands of … foreign ministers.” Mthembu assured Sundkler that it was good that “missionary influence … is dead and forgotten.”140 Sundkler’s new thirty-page chapter, thus, recanted his prior condemnation of the independent churches’ traditionalism; questioned “whether our viewpoint in the first edition was not too foreign, too Western”; and now maintained that European mission churches represented “bondage” over the “African soul.”141 Sundkler conceded there were not many African critics of apartheid—the “politically conscious”—in the independent churches. But he confessed that he wondered whether African criticism of segregation was entirely justified, citing an unnamed “influential black politician in Durban”—perhaps Mthembu—whose view was that “Apartheid … [was] an opportunity in disguise for Africans.”142 Attentive to ethnography’s value, Mthembu wove this revised version of Bantu Prophets into his own pro-apartheid polemics. During a public lecture in 1959, he informed his listeners about the research into Bantu religion he had conducted with a European academic he identified as “Dr B. Sundkler.” Citing his investigation into “tribal” religions, Mthembu argued that his research confirmed the superiority of an African Christian experience along “their own lines,” free from European missionaries. In supporting segregationist legislation, he was inspired by his ethnographic research: “Apartheid is not bad and should be encouraged and guided. I speak from my own experience of a study of Bantu Churches, which I made with Dr B. Sundkler and which enabled us to produce a book called Bantu Prophets.”143 However, Mthembu’s deployment of Bantu Prophets went beyond its persuasive value in the period’s lively intra-African debates surrounding segregation. Mthembu also recognized ethnography’s practical relevance for Black churches seeking to persuade government officials they were genuine “African” Christians. Popular ethnography could tell readers how to become the authentic “Bantu” required by the apartheid state. By the mid-1950s, Mthembu had started a small business at 318 Grey Street in Durban using the offices of his friend, prominent Zulu politician and pro-traditionalist George Champion.144 Mthembu’s business dispensed ethnographic knowledge that instructed clients how to portray themselves to government officials as exemplars of Bantu culture. In the context of a state governing Africans via their Bantu identities, this was ethnographic advice with significant strategic implications. Herbalists struggling to maintain their practices after the passage of legislation banning “witchdoctors” were among Mthembu’s most frequent clients.145 Mthembu advised these individuals on how to present themselves not as forbidden witchdoctors but as culturally authentic purveyors of traditional Bantu medicine (and in the process, papering over the long-standing links African herbalists shared with Indian medical practitioners).146 In these activities, Mthembu was aided by the widespread perception that he enjoyed close links to the government and could reliably advise what officialdom considered legitimate “Bantu” activity. Mthembu deliberately cultivated this impression, grandiosely telling clients that “he communicates directly with the Minister [of Native Affairs] … even sometimes showing [the minister’s] letters.”147 Figure 3: Open in new tabDownload slide Sundkler preaching to a gathering of independent churches, Durban, 1958, from Marja Liisa Swantz, Beyond the Forestline: The Life and Letters of Bengt Sundkler (Leominster, 2002), n.p. Reproduced with permission from Gracewing Publishers. Figure 3: Open in new tabDownload slide Sundkler preaching to a gathering of independent churches, Durban, 1958, from Marja Liisa Swantz, Beyond the Forestline: The Life and Letters of Bengt Sundkler (Leominster, 2002), n.p. Reproduced with permission from Gracewing Publishers. Mthembu also capitalized upon his reputation as an expert on Zulu culture, leaning on the knowledge of traditional chieftaincy he accumulated researching for Killie Campbell. Beleaguered chiefs were, thus, another client base. In 1958, one supplicant was Chief Mgwazeni of the KwaMbonambi, a figure attempting to gain NAD backing against his rival, W. P. Mkwanazi. An outraged Mkwanazi complained that Mthembu assisted Mgwazeni by instructing him in the lore of the chiefdom; Mgwazeni used to “go to [Mthembu] in Durban and then he would show them a way to Pietermaritzburg [NAD headquarters] by referring the papers he has collected on our chiefdom.”148 For all his clients, whether chiefs or herbalists, Mthembu’s advice was to play up their credentials as “Bantu.” It was for this reason that Mthembu wrote to the NAD on behalf of Absolom Xaba, whose General Dealer shop was threatened with closure by the magistrate: “[the] Government’s policy is that the Bantu should do things for themselves … no white should interfere with them in their own areas while serving their own people.”149 It was the independent churches, however, that were Mthembu’s most frequent visitors at 318 Grey Street. Despite the NAD’s sympathetic stance, by the mid-1950s, these organizations were being threatened with expulsion from urban areas as part of the NAD’s broader “influx control” restrictions against Africans in towns and cities.150 Recognizing their imminent crisis, many churches turned to Mthembu. Some organizations, it is true, made their own appeals to NAD officials for “recognition,” usually employing the counsel of European law firms. In making these pleas, Africans were advised by their lawyers to emphatically communicate their support for apartheid. The 1958 application for recognition by J. E. Shange of the Christian Church of South Africa begged the Native Affairs minister to “allow me to close with great thankfulness that the Nationalist Party has returned to power. It was the answer to our prayer.”151 But virtually none of these applications for recognition were successful.152 Desperate for assistance and perhaps disillusioned with law firms’ high fees, many churches sought Mthembu’s help. It is true that much of Mthembu’s advice was not that different from that of the lawyers. He advised his clients to be compliant with the apartheid state; the Reverend John L. Gwala found Mthembu “advised us to keep calm and docile … he told us the Minister for Native Affairs has the power [over] Native Churches, and loyalty to the Government was essential.”153 But Mthembu could offer independent churches something most European lawyers could not: expert advice on exactly how to style their churches as authentically “Bantu.” Mthembu found that Bantu Prophets—which had become the period’s authoritative account of Black Christianity that he had been intimately involved in producing—was an indispensable manual. What in the 1940s was taken by Mthembu as a denunciation of “paganism” was now a glowing account of indigenized faith in the different milieu of the late 1950s. Not all independent church leaders welcomed the book’s arguments. Some objected to its suggestion that they constituted a separate Bantu Christianity removed from the Christian mainstream. J. G. Shembe, the influential leader of the Nazaretha, resented Sundkler’s depiction of him as a “Bantu Messiah.” Shembe was seeking to position the Nazaretha as a mainstream Christian denomination as part of a strategic bid to enroll his ministers in Protestant training seminaries. Thus, he was “very bitter” to be cast as an exotic specimen of African Christianity.154 Similarly objecting to his portrayal as a “Bantu Messiah,” the powerful minister Walter Dimba refused to be interviewed by Mthembu because “of what he had read about himself in your book The Bantu Prophets which he contended wasn’t true.”155 Nicholas Bhengu, the popular Zulu evangelical leader of the Assemblies of God South Africa, was another figure who critiqued the book’s depiction of “Bantu” Christianity.156 Linked to North American financial backers, Bhengu was cultivating his links to a global evangelical Christian tradition rather than playing the politics of religious nativism.157 Mthembu, however, found many more independent church leaders who welcomed the opportunity to legitimate themselves as culturally authentic Black Christians. For one, Mthembu and his clients recognized Bantu Prophets as a useful index of contemporary Bantu religiosity. Considerable confusion existed regarding whether independent churches had gained the status of “recognition.” Given the rapidity with which new churches sprouted up, most clergy were at a loss regarding their legal status. This gave rise to situations whereby senior clergy proclaimed they were “recognized” in an effort to gain followers; as Mthembu noted, “there are a lot of Bantu Churches who deceive their followers that they are recognized.”158 This compounded the urgency with which church leaders sought clarification concerning their status but as yet “had nothing to guide them with,” and so Mthembu found “I have been approached by many asking me to tell them whether the sects they follow are recognized or not.”159 Mthembu identified some governmental literature to consult. But it was Bantu Prophets that provided Mthembu and his clients with the most authoritative contemporary index of Black Christianity, with its twenty-page appendix listing all the independent churches in the country. Mthembu found that when “churches ask me if they are recognized,” his most reliable source of information was “Bantu Prophets which gives all the Bantu Churches and those recognized by the Government.”160 And for their part, independent churches eagerly seized on the value of having their own organization inscribed in this pantheon of “Bantu Prophets.”161 Many took their presence within its pages as evidence that their organizations constituted genuine “Bantu” Christianity. During Mthembu’s meetings with “the sects,” he found that when “I read all the names on [the] list, and whenever the name of their church was read, they said ‘Hallelujah, Amen.’ They are proud to hear their churches are written in the book.”162 Some leaders conflated being “written” in Sundkler’s renowned book with being recognized. One NAD official reported having shown a church leader Bantu Prophets, “who then noticed his church [in the list] and stated his church is registered.”163 Mthembu also encouraged his clients to take their cue from Sundkler’s account of their organizations as “traditional” religion. One client was the Apostolic Holy Salema in Zion of South Africa Church, which had unsuccessfully sought recognition from the NAD throughout the 1950s. When approached by the church for assistance, Mthembu supplied a copy of Bantu Prophets and instructed the minister to refer to Sundkler’s portrayal of a segregated world of Bantu Christianity in future correspondence with NAD officials. The Holy Salema Church’s revised constitution of 1958, submitted by Minister Mngoma in his application for recognition to the NAD, thus included these words: “This Church does not agree for Europeans, Indians or Chinese to become members … The Church agrees only with all tribes of the Natives of Africa, and BANTU of this country to become members. Please refer to the work of Dr. Sundkler for more information.”164 Eager to mobilize the book in their portrayal of themselves as Bantu religionists, church leaders besieged Mthembu with requests for Bantu Prophets. Mthembu found “nearly all want to have a copy, especially those whose names are in there.” Ever enterprising, Mthembu suggested acting as Sundkler’s agent: “I ought to take orders.”165 Peter Mkhize, a lay Lutheran who also conducted research for Sundkler in 1958, even proposed Sundkler translate the book to increase its accessibility for independent churches: “What about producing your Bantu Prophets in the vernaculars, Zulu and Southern Sotho? … Whoever I meet is rather excited about your book, especially the very people about whom you write.”166 Armed with Bantu Prophets, Mthembu had success with persuading the NAD of independent churches’ status as legitimate Bantu Christians; his obituary from 1960 noted that he “helped many pastors register with the government … [an] often difficult process.”167 Mthembu also fed copies of the book to the Afrikaner officials of the NAD, who came to view the book as an indispensable manual for their own segregationist ambitions.168 By the late 1950s, the government was considering creating an amalgamation of independent churches into a few large bodies to more efficiently administer them. In 1958, Verwoerd proposed five as the ideal number of “Bantu Churches,” a figure that may possibly have collated with his vision of the number of ethnic groups into which Black South Africans should be divided.169 Ethnography would play a key role in this classificatory endeavor: officials viewed Sundkler’s typologies of Black-led churches as a valuable guide. Of particular interest was Bantu Prophets’ account of the “tribal” affiliations of certain independent churches. In 1956, Mthembu told Sundkler about the role his book played in shaping NAD policy: “the government has agreed the Bantu Churches should unite,” he explained, “your book will be most used in this connection.”170 During Sundkler’s 1958 visit, moreover, Mthembu facilitated several meetings between Sundkler and officials to consult on which organizations might amalgamate.171 Mthembu’s NAD handler, B. J. Steyn, “read Bantu Prophets with the greatest interest” (it had been given to him by Mthembu), stating it was “a great help to the work of the Department.”172 Officials increasingly turned to the book as a much-needed guide to the confusing morass of thousands of churches. A new state-funded theological college in Zululand was directed by NAD officials to include Bantu Prophets as a textbook for its Christian theology syllabus, now hailed as a foundational manual for a quintessentially Bantu Christianity.173 Mthembu’s success in these matters did not mean his relations with apartheid officials were always harmonious. As the 1950s progressed, white officials found Mthembu high-handed, and they complained that he exaggerated his influence to gain clients. As P. J. Potgieter sternly reminded Mthembu upon discovering he was using the NAD address for his own correspondence, “Your cooperation is appreciated, but don’t let that fact run you into abuse … I trust you will supply your private address to your clients.”174 Repeated requests from Mthembu for NAD stationery—writing paper, notebooks, envelopes—to use in his business correspondence and for his research were turned down as “he could mislead the Bantu people by pretending to be a government official.”175 And despite his cash shortage, Mthembu refused a full-time position with the NAD, feeling that this would reduce his autonomy (only requesting reimbursement for expenses incurred during his work).176 Officials increasingly worried about who was using whom, and whether Mthembu’s promotion of Bantu identity was merely a cynical strategy to gain clients, commenting disapprovingly, “that man will do anything for money.”177 By 1959, Potgieter wrote to his superiors in Pretoria with a “warning” about Mthembu, noting that his ethnographic expertise—his encyclopedic knowledge of chieftaincies, churches, and Bantu customs—was being deployed for self-interest rather than a principled commitment to apartheid: “The man is very dangerous … He uses information to build his own prestige amongst the Bantu.”178 In this same year, NAD officials concluded that “he is a person who cannot be trusted” and advised the Special Branch to “keep a watchful eye on him.”179 While NAD officials doubted Mthembu’s sincerity, African activists denounced him as a traitor. Rumors increasingly circulated that Mthembu was a government spy.180 By the end of the 1950s, he was under scrutiny not only from the government’s Special Branch but also from the ANC-allied Black vigilance associations in Durban.181 Collaboration, it turned out, could have deadly consequences. In mid-1960, Mthembu was found hanging from a tree in central Durban under mysterious circumstances; the cause of death was undetermined, although given the volatile climate of Durban, it was very likely to have been an assassination by ANC activists.182 Mthembu’s pockets were stuffed with anti-communist pamphlets, a testimony to the importance Mthembu accorded to texts like Bantu Prophets in crafting his pro-segregationist ideology as well as to the life-and-death stakes of these documents in turbulent and divided 1950s South Africa. Mthembu’s obituary noted the one possession found near his body was a “large bag” he “never parted with.” It was into this bag, his obituary continued, that he continually rummaged during his frequent political debates, and from which he would procure one or another text—undoubtedly including Bantu Prophets—to deploy for polemical effect: “if there was an argument, it was out of this bag that he would take out his books and papers.”183 Figure 4: Open in new tabDownload slide “T. W. S. Mthembu Is No More, Found Hanging: The Deceased and the Tree” [in isiZulu], Ilanga lase Natal, September 10, 1960. Reproduced with permission from Killie Campbell Library, Durban, South Africa. Figure 4: Open in new tabDownload slide “T. W. S. Mthembu Is No More, Found Hanging: The Deceased and the Tree” [in isiZulu], Ilanga lase Natal, September 10, 1960. Reproduced with permission from Killie Campbell Library, Durban, South Africa. The sixty years following Titus Mthembu’s death have seen his legacy erased from popular consciousness. Likewise, the fortunes of Bantu Prophets in South Africa have declined. Outside of small readerships confined to religious studies and theology, the text is not widely read either within or outside the academy. As the anti-apartheid coalition within South Africa gained strength, texts like Bantu Prophets did not fare well. Throughout the 1960s, Sundkler increasingly complained that he felt sidelined by younger radical African National Congress activists.184 In 1977, Manas Buthelezi, a prominent Zulu Lutheran priest and an outspoken opponent of apartheid, denounced Sundkler and Bantu Prophets’ emphasis on African theology as overly “ethnographic” in its idealization of an African past. Buthelezi advocated for a radical “Black Theology” that transcended ethnic identities in favor of shared Black solidarity.185 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, an increasingly ANC-dominated liberation narrative denounced the Zulu “Bantu Prophets” celebrated by Sundkler and Mthembu as examples of false consciousness and as collaborators who betrayed Black liberation.186 The post-1994 political settlement ensured the heroes of the new South Africa were those who espoused ANC non-racialism rather than Natal and Zululand’s ethnicist politicians. And now that all restrictions were lifted from Black-led independent churches, religious leaders no longer needed the text to favorably represent themselves to officials. But although no longer widely circulated, Bantu Prophets still has relevance for contemporary South Africa and especially for debates surrounding knowledge production. Epistemological politics continue to be as fraught now as they were during Mthembu’s day. Much attention is currently being paid to decolonizing knowledge, which is reflective of a popular impulse to rid South Africa of the still-persistent legacy of white rule. One such project is the African Center for Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science, established at the University of Johannesburg in 2017. Its mission is to “pursue all projects with an African conscience, through encouraging work that is African in nature and salient to African challenges and concerns.”187 Another project is the effort to reshape universities’ curricula in favor of African intellectual production. As one advocate phrased it, “the curriculum at South African universities continues to favor and reproduce Eurocentric knowledge while other knowledges are ignored, side-lined and devalued.”188 There is much to celebrate in these attempts to strengthen continental sites of knowledge production and to create a new canon that writes apartheid out of African intellectual history. Yet Titus Mthembu and the history of Bantu Prophets provide a cautionary tale to such enterprises. Mthembu’s career reminds us of the difficulties of separating African from Eurocentric knowledge, and it also underscores the polemical use of such projects, especially by those who speak on behalf of an essentially African episteme. One need only think of former president Thabo Mbeki’s controversial invocation of African science in HIV/AIDS treatment to recognize the complex moral and political terrain on which such calls to decolonize knowledge in the name of an African episteme find themselves. The reality, then, is anything but simple. The histories of knowledge production in Africa and elsewhere are dense and entangled; authors are hard to locate, texts seldom speak with one voice, and the afterlives of books endure in ways that would surprise those whose names appear on their title pages. Joel Cabrita is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she has taught since 2019. She is the author of The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement (Harvard University Press, 2018), which was the recipient of the American Society of Church History Best Book for Global Christianity in 2019, as well as the author of Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is coeditor with Felicitas Becker and Marie Rodet of Religion, Media and Marginality in Modern Africa (Ohio University Press, 2018) and Relocating World Christianity (Brill, 2017) with Emma Wild-Wood and David Maxwell. Cabrita is currently writing the biography of the South African writer Regina Gelana Twala (under contract with Ohio University Press). She is also a Senior Research Associate in the Department of History at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. I gratefully acknowledge the research assistance (archival and translation) provided by Kyle Harmse, Thato Sukati, and Andreas Wejderstam. I consulted Sundkler’s archives during a trip to Uppsala, Sweden, in 2013. Johannes Zeiler and Kajsa Ahlstrand generously hosted me during this trip. I am very grateful to Andrew Bank, Timothy Jenkins, Paul la Hausse de la Louvriere, Nancy J. Jacobs and Derek Peterson for their invaluable comments on this article in draft form. I presented a version of this paper at the African Studies Association meeting in Boston, November 21–23, 2019. As respondent for the panel, Dan Magaziner provided most helpful feedback. My research was supported by an internal Cambridge University Grant as well as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award (Early Career Fellowship, No. AH/R005567/1, awarded 2015) and a Phillip Leverhulme Early Career Prize (awarded 2017). I am extremely grateful for this financial assistance, without which a project such as this—requiring consultation of archives in South Africa and Sweden—would not have been possible. Notes 1 Bengt Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (London, 1948). Unless otherwise noted, citations in the text come from this first edition. 2 Bengt Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 2nd ed. (London, 1961). 3 Shireen Ally and Arianna Lissoni, “Let’s Talk About Bantustans,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 1–4. 4 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), and Gauri Viswanathan, Marks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London, 1990); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J., 2001). See also Derek Peterson, “Gambling with God: Rethinking Religion in Colonial Central Kenya,” in Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof, eds., The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 37–58; David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville, Va., 1996). 5 Hilda Kuper, An African Aristocracy: Rank among the Swazi (London, 1947), 1; Roger Sanjek, “Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and their Ethnographers,” Anthropology Today 9, no. 2 (1993): 13–18; George W. Stocking, introduction to Stocking, ed., Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison, Wisc., 1991), 3; Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: A Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, 1991), 182; Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1989). 6 Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, 1995); Robert Gordon, “Apartheid’s Anthropologists: The Genealogy of Afrikaner Anthropology,” American Ethnologist 15, no. 3 (1988): 535–553. 7 W. D. Hammond-Tooke, “N. J. van Warmelo and the Ethnological Section, a Memoir,” African Studies 54, no. 1 (1995): 119–128; Saul Dubow, “Afrikaner Nationalism, Apartheid and the Conceptualization of Race,” Journal of African History 33, no. 2 (1992): 209–237; Andrew Bank, “The Berlin Mission Society and German Linguistic Roots of Volkekunde: The Background, Training and Hamburg Writings of Werner Eiselen, 1899–1924,” Kronos 41, no. 1 (2005): 166–192. 8 For example, Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe, “African Scholars, African Studies and Knowledge Production on Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 86, no. 2 (2016): 324–338; Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Siphamandla Zondi, eds., Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa (Durham, N.C., 2016). 9 This scholarship has been especially strong with regard to South Asia. Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1879 (Cambridge, 1996); Phillip B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 4 (2003): 783–814; Thomas Trautman, “Hullabaloo about Telegu,” South Asia Research 19, no. 1 (1999): 53–70. 10 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 22ff.; Andrew Bank and Leslie J. Bank, eds., Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and her Interpreters (Cambridge, 2013), especially chaps. 2, 4, 5, and 8; Nancy J. Jacobs, Birders of Africa: History of a Network (New Haven, Conn., 2016); Mary Mazimba Mbewe, “Language, Biography and Social Scientific Knowledge Production: Godfrey Wilson, Xavier Kofie and Zacharia Mawere in Northern Rhodesia, 1938–1941,” Journal of Southern African Studies (forthcoming); Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, N.C., 2001), e.g., 3, 17, 227; Nancy J. Jacobs, “The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 3 (2006): 564–603; Jeff Guy, “Class, Imperialism and Literary Criticism: William Ngidi, John Colenso and Matthew Arnold,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 219–241; Patrick Harries, Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Athens, Ohio, 2007), 219–232; Carolyn Hamilton, “Backstory, Biography and the Life of the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 38 (2011): 319–341. 11 For isiZulu literary production of the 1920s–1940s, see Paul la Hausse de la Louvriere, “The War of the Books: Petros Lamula and African Nationalism in Natal,” in Derek Peterson and Giacomo Macola, eds., Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens, Ohio, 2009), 50–74. 12 Derek Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival (Cambridge, 2012), 3–5. There are a growing number of studies on the politics of mid-twentieth-century Natal and Zululand: Jill Kelly, “Bantu Authorities and Betterment in Natal: The Ambiguous Responses of Chiefs and Regents, 1955–1970,” Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 273–297; Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Athens, Ohio, 2017). 13 For example, Ntongola Masilela, The Cultural Modernity of HIE Dhlomo (Trenton, N.J., 2007). 14 I am grateful to Paul la Hausse for drawing my attention to these institutions and individuals. See also D. K. Ntshangase, “Between the Lion and the Devil: The Life and Works of B. W. Vilakazi, 1906–1947” (African Studies seminar paper, Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand, July 1995). 15 Bruce Berman and John M. Lonsdale, “The Labors of Muigwithania: Jomo Kenyatta as Author, 1928–1945,” Research in African Literatures 29, no. 1 (1998): 16–42, here 30–31; Derek R. Peterson, “Reading John Mbiti from Uganda,” accessed December 31, 2019, https://africasacountry.com/2019/10/reading-john-mbiti-from-uganda. See also Peterson and Macola, Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa. 16 For an example of this earlier scholarship, see Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London, 1983). 17 See Paul la Hausse de la Louvriere’s nuanced treatment of “collaborative” African figures in Natal, which mentions Titus Mthembu on page 501: “So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,” Cahiers d’études africaines 127, no. 32 (1992): 469–507. See Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Johannesburg, 2014); Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, “Ethnic Separatism or Cultural Preservation? Ndebele Radio under Apartheid, 1983–1994,” in Shireen Ally and Arianna Lissoni, eds., New Histories of South Africa’s Apartheid-Era Bantustans (London, 2017), 98–119. 18 Lutheran Theological Institute Archives, Pietermaritzburg (hereafter LTI), box 40, Umpumulo Institution, “List of Former Students and Home Addresses.” The Cooperating Lutheran Mission was a federation of Swedish, Norwegian, German, and North American Lutheran Mission Societies formed in 1910 for the purposes of aiding evangelistic work and education in South Africa. 19 Pietermaritzburg Archival Depot (hereafter PAD), IBAD P/2/M, “Report of Tour from 26–29 January 1954 by F. J. Malan.” Although these belong to the same collection, these files are inconsistently labeled, variously appearing as IBAD, INL, and IBAN. I have used whatever designation appears on the archival box. See also H. G. Scriba, “Lutheran Missions and Churches in South Africa,” in Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Oxford, 1998), 173–194, here 173. 20 LTI, box 8, Cooperating Lutheran Mission Annual Reports, “Annual Report of Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1938.” 21 Killie Campbell Archives, Pietermaritzburg (hereafter KCL), Ilanga lase Natal, September 10, 1960. 22 LTI, box 41, Mapumulo Institute School Reports, “T4 First Year, June 1938.” 23 LTI, box 8, “Annual Report of Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1931.” 24 LTI, box 43, Umpumulo Institution Log Books, “Minutes of Meeting 21 September 1935.” 25 LTI, box 8, Cooperating Lutheran Mission Annual Reports, “Annual Report of Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1938.” 26 LTI, box 40, Mapumulo Institution, 1893–1933: A Sketch of 40 Years’ Work and “The Coming of Age of Work” under the Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1912–1933 (Umpumulo, 1933). 27 LTI, box 8, “Annual Report of Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1938.” 28 Ibid.; LTI, box 8, “Annual Report of Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1940.” 29 LTI, box 43, Umpumulo Institution, Literary Society Notebook, “Minutes, 1933–1935.” 30 Marja-Liisa Swantz, Beyond the Forestline: The Life and Letters of Bengt Sundkler (Leominster, 2002), 20. 31 Ibid., 7, 13. 32 Ibid., 90. 33 Bengt Sundkler, The Christian Ministry in Africa (London, 1962), 222. 34 Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 20. 35 Bengt Sundkler Papers, University of Uppsala (hereafter BSP), Correspondence Files, Mthembu to Sundkler, June 30, 1941. 36 For recent accounts of the independent churches including those of Zionist persuasion, see Joel Cabrita, Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church (Cambridge, 2014), and The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 2018). 37 Gustav Sjoblom, “The Missionary Image of Africa: Evidence from Sweden, 1885–1895” (unpublished paper, Henry Martyn Centre Lent Term Seminars, Westminster College, Madingley Road, Cambridge, February 20, 2003); see also Brian du Toit, “Missionaries, Anthropologists and the Policies of the Dutch Reformed Church,” Journal of Modern African Studies 22, no. 4 (1984): 617–632, here 622. 38 Bank, “The Berlin Mission Society and German Linguistic Roots of Volkekunde,” 173; Scriba, “Lutheran Missions and Churches in South Africa,” 186. 39 Scriba, “Lutheran Missions and Churches in South Africa,” 187. 40 LTI, box 10, CLM 14, Cooperating Lutheran Missions, “Report of 4th Conference of Native Lutheran Pastors’ Conference, Untunjambili, 3 June 1929.” 41 LTI, box 10, Lutheran Conference of Natal, “Minutes of Meeting of Executive Committee of the Lutheran Conference, Durban, 9 May 1933.” 42 LTI, box 10, CLM 14, Cooperating Lutheran Missions, “Report of 4th Conference of Native Lutheran Pastors’ Conference, Untunjambili, 3 June 1929.” 43 Sundker, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 17. 44 Indeed, many of these anthropologists had personal ties to the Lutheran Mission and were shaped by its volk theories and German ethno-linguistic notions of racial purity. Gordon, “Apartheid’s Anthropologists,” 537; Andrew Bank, “Ethnological Writings of Werner Eiselen, Stellenbosch University, 1926–1936,” Anthropology Southern Africa 38, nos. 3–4 (2015): 166–192. 45 Indeed, when Sundkler left South Africa in 1942 for Tanganyika, it was Holleman whom his will nominated to continue his research into the independent churches should he die. “Bengt Sundkler’s Will, 5 May 1942, written at Ceza, Zululand,” cited in Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 24. 46 Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 24; Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 83 n. 26; Robert Gordon, “Anthropology in the World Court: The 1966 South-West Africa Case,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 31, no. 1 (2004): 3–11, here 5. 47 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 14. 48 Sundkler’s master’s thesis, titled Jesus and the Pagans, focused on this tension between a locally relevant Gospel versus a universal Christian tradition. 49 David Bosch, “Jesus and the Gentiles—a Review after Thirty Years,” in Peter Beyerhaus and Carl F. Hallencreutz, eds., Daring in Order to Know: Studies in Bengt Sundkler’s Contribution as Africanist and Missionary Scholar (Uppsala, 1984), 3–19. 50 Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 22. 51 BSP, box 91, Transcript of Interview of Bengt Sundkler by Robert Hill, UCLA, Los Angeles, July 12, 1982, “How I Wrote Bantu Prophets,” n.p. 52 BSP, Correspondence Files, Richards to Sundkler, February 13, 1939. 53 BSP, box 96, Sundkler to “Dear Friends,” April 1942. 54 Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 22. 55 Ibid., 20. 56 Paul la Hausse de la Louvriere, Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the Lives of Petros Lamula (1881–1948) and Lymon Maling (1880–c. 1936) (Pietermaritzburg, 2000); Daniel P. Kunene, “African-Language Literatures of Southern Africa,” in F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi, eds., The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge, 2008), 289–305, here 298ff. 57 BSP, “How I Wrote Bantu Prophets,” n.p. Sundkler received funding for their salaries from the Swedish Olaus Petri Foundation. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 10. 58 BSP, box 96, Sundkler to unnamed recipients [circular letter], n.d., ca. April 1942; Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 22; BSP, Correspondence Files, Richards to Sundkler, February 13, 1939. Despite Sundkler’s injunction to write in isiZulu, most of the surviving reports are written in English. 59 LTI [no box number], “Applications to Study at Oscarsberg in 1950s, Abnandab Cebekhulu”; BSP [no box number], T. W. S. Mthembu to B. Sundkler, September 16, 1942. 60 BSP [no box number], T. W. S. Mthembu to B. Sundkler, September 16, 1942. 61 LTI, box 8, Cooperating Lutheran Mission Annual Reports, “Annual Report of Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1941.” Msomi jointly graduated at the top of the class with Simon Mbatha, both obtaining a 94 percent. The student at the bottom of the class was none other than Titus Mthembu. 62 BSP, box 97, K. Msomi to B. Sundkler, July 11, 1944. 63 BSP [no box number], Mthembu to Sundkler, August 10, 1942. 64 BSP, box 97, Msomi to Sundkler, July 10, 1941; BSP, box 113, Mabaso to Sundkler, April 17, 1942. 65 BSP, box 112, Mthembu to Sundkler, May 20, 1942. 66 BSP, box 95, Mthembu to Sundkler, August 15, 1941. 67 BSP, Correspondence Files, Mthembu to Sundkler, January 18, 1943. 68 Bengt Sundkler, Zulu Zion and Some Swazi Zionists (Oxford, 1976), 330. Unfortunately, only a few pages of Mthembu’s fieldnotes from the 1940s have survived. Much of the following is based on Mthembu’s correspondence with Sundkler. 69 BSP, box 124, Mhlungu to Sundkler, August 28, 1941. 70 This was a wider perception among educated African Christian elites. Cabrita, Text and Authority, 74. 71 BSP, Correspondence Files, Mthembu to Sundkler, September 16, 1942. 72 BSP, box 124, Mhlungu to Sundkler, August 28, 1941. 73 Sundkler spent six months writing the manuscript at Birmingham’s Selly Oak College, a theological institution specializing in the study of overseas missions. 74 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 296. Audrey Richards, review of Bantu Prophets in South Africa, by B. G. M. Sundkler, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 19, no. 3 (1949): 248–249, here 248; Max Gluckman, review of Bantu Prophets in South Africa, by B. G. M. Sundkler,” African Affairs 48, no. 191 (1949), 168. 75 Hammond-Tooke, “N. J. van Warmelo and the Ethnological Section, a Memoir,” 125. 76 For example, see the debates carried out in the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu, January 9 and April 22, 1939. 77 Elizabeth Le Roux, A Social History of the University Presses in Apartheid South Africa (Leiden, 2016), 87; Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 18. 78 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 237–240. 79 Ibid., 297. 80 Sundkler’s introduction did acknowledge “the competent and keen co-operation of ten Zulu assistants,” but he did not mention any of them by name, not even his most prolific correspondent Mthembu. See Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 15. The South African theologian G. C. Oosthuizen attacked Sundkler for precisely this: Oosthuizen, The Theology of a South African Messiah (Leiden, 1967), 149. For Sundkler’s reply, see BSP, box 95, Sundkler to Oosthuizen, March 31, 1969. 81 For example, Mthembu’s account of spirit mediumship in the church reemerged in Sundkler’s description of the Nazaretha church in Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 55, 121. 82 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 277. 83 BSP, box 124, Mpanza to Sundkler, n.d., ca. 1944. 84 David Welsh, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Johannesburg, 2009), 63. For a discussion of Bantu Authorities—a key piece of apartheid legislation—in Natal during the 1950s, see Jill Kelly, “Bantu Authorities and Betterment in Natal: The Ambiguous Responses of Chiefs and Regents, 1955–1970,” Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 273–297. 85 Welsh, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 110–112. 86 La Hausse, “So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,” 488–498. 87 LTI, box 8, Cooperating Lutheran Missions Annual Reports, “Annual Report of Cooperating Lutheran Missions in Natal, 1930.” 88 BSP, box 91, “How I Wrote Bantu Prophets,” n.p. 89 Scriba, “Lutheran Missions and Churches in South Africa,” 183. 90 LTI, box 10, Cooperating Lutheran Missions, “Report of 4th Conference of Native Lutheran Pastors Conference, Untunjambili, 3 June 1929.” 91 Sundkler, The Christian Ministry in Africa, 180. 92 While a small number of African pastors had left the mission in earlier decades, for the most part it was the late 1940s that saw a tide of secessions. In 1949, for example, the prominent and well-regarded Jonathan Sibiya resigned from the mission due to missionaries’ insistence he relocate to an inferior post in remote Zululand without adequate housing. Sibiya’s furious resignation letter declared, “I don’t like your treatment of me, and I won’t stand for it.” BSP, Correspondence Files, Sibiya to Swensson, October 1, 1949. 93 Wits Historical Papers, Allison Wessels George Champion Papers, 1925–1959, Collection Number A922, C67 Champion to Native Commissioner, Eshowe, April 13, 1954. 94 LTI, OSC1, LTS at Rorkes Drift, Lutheran Theological Seminary Principal to Sundkler, August 4, 1957. 95 La Hausse, “So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,” 501. 96 KCL, file no. 23, Mthembu to Campbell, August 22, 1952. 97 PAD, INL 2/Z/44, Mthembu to Senior Information Officer, August 30, 1958. 98 BSP, Correspondence Files, Mthembu to Sundkler, March 1949; La Hausse, “So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,” 481. 99 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Transcript of Lecture by TWS Mthembu, Otimati, Natal Teachers’ Union, May 15, 1954. 100 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, n.d., ca. 1957. 101 BSP, Correspondence Files, Msomi to Sundkler, June 25, 1949. 102 In itself, this was not a new phenomenon. Zulu ethnicity had been mobilized since the 1920s. But this decade saw an intensification of these efforts. See La Hausse, Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the Lives of Petros Lamula (1881–1948) and Lymon Maling (1880–c. 1936); Nicholas Cope, To Bind the Nation: Solomon kaDinuzulu and Zulu Nationalism, 1913–1933 (Pietermaritzburg, 1993); Shula Marks, “Patriotism, Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness,” in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), 215–240. 103 Mthembu shared these views with many of his Lutheran African peers. As prominent religious leaders, many in his Oscarsberg class facilitated Bantu Education by acting as chairmen and secretaries of the controversial new School Boards; by 1957, Mthembu informed Sundkler, “all those you taught at Oscarsberg are now members of School Boards.” BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, February 6, 1957. See also A. Kolberg Buverud, The King and the Honeybirds: Cyprian Bhekuzulu ka Solomon, Zulu Nationalism and the Implementation of the Bantu Authorities System in Zululand, 1948–1957 (Ph.D. diss., University of Oslo, 2007), 13. 104 PAD, INL 2/Z/44, Mthembu to Senior Information Officer (hereafter SIO), August 16, 1958. 105 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Transcript of Lecture by TWS Mthembu, Otimati, Natal Teachers’ Union, May 15, 1954. 106 PAD, INL 2/Z/44, Mthembu to Minister of Native Affairs, November 25, 1953. See also Mthembu’s lament, “I have seen European girls dancing with Native boys, drinking, spooning etc, in order to fight apartheid indirectly.” IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to SIO, February 11, 1960. 107 PAD, INL 2/2/34, Mthembu to unnamed recipient, May 30, 1954. Other Zulu figures to similarly “aid” the NAD were writer R. R. R. Dhlomo and the prominent journalist Julius G. Malie. IBAN P/2/M, Dhlomo to Steyn, March 28, 1955; INL 2/Z/44, Malie to Director, Information Department, March 4, 1954. 108 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Rev. Dekker to SIO [in Afrikaans], February 12, 1954. 109 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Minister of Native Affairs, November 25, 1953. See also Kelly, “Bantu Authorities and Betterment in Natal.” 110 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Steyn, March 21, 1955. 111 PAD, INL 2/Z/38, Mthembu to SIO, May 15, 1954. 112 PAD, INL 2/Z/44, Mthembu to SIO, March 21, 1955. 113 PAD, INL 2/Z/22, “Minutes” by TWS Mthembu, January 11, 1955; C. S. Nyembezi, Zulu Proverbs (Johannesburg, 1963). 114 PAD, INL 2/Z/38, Mthembu report to SIO, June 11, 1955, Mtunzini district. 115 PAD, INL 2/Z/44, Chief Information Officer (hereafter CIO) to Alex Mphalala, January 22, 1955. 116 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to SIO, February 13, 1958; Mthembu to unknown recipient, March 24, 1945. 117 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, December 27, 1956. 118 Ibid.; PAD, IBAN P/2/M, SIO to Mthembu, March 29, 1954. 119 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, December 27, 1956. 120 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, February 6, 1957. 121 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Steyn, May 26, 1954. 122 Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 143. The International African Institute awarded Sundkler £1000 for research leading to the second edition. 123 Ibid., 33ff. This culminated in Sundkler’s The Christian Ministry in Africa (London, 1960). 124 Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 138. 125 University of KwaZulu-Natal Archives, Pietermaritzburg Campus, Institute for Social Research Archives, Director’s Report for November 1957 to July 1958. 126 BSP, “How I Wrote Bantu Prophets,” n.p. 127 Swantz, Beyond the Forestline, 251–252; Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 236. 128 Report of Native Churches Commission (Cape Town, 1925); Pretoria National Archives (hereafter PNA), NTS 154/214, “Holy Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion,” Hlatshwayo to Secretary for Native Affairs, August 20, 1956. 129 Bank, “Ethnological Writings of Werner Eiselen, Stellenbosch University, 1926–1936,” 176. 130 PNA, BAO 7274, Eiselen to C. J. Lucas, November 7, 1953. In similar fashion, the Tomlinson Report of 1955 regarded “the acceleration of ecclesiastical independence among the Bantu as essential.” D. Hobart Houghton, The Tomlinson Report: A Summary of the Findings and Recommendations in the Tomlinson Commission Report (Johannesburg, 1956), 201. 131 BSP, box 95, Sundkler to Potgieter, June 25, 1958; BSP, box 117, Sundkler to National Council for Social Research, Department of Education, Arts and Sciences, Pretoria, August 1957; BSP, box 124, “Institute of Social Research, University of Natal, to the Principal of X School,” August 4, 1958; BSP, box 96, Bourquin to Sundkler, October 6, 1959. 132 BSP, box 15, Mthembu to Sundkler, October 9, 1956. 133 BSP, box 96, Sundkler to Mthembu, April 14, 1959. 134 BSP, Correspondence Files, Holleman to Sundkler, October 28, 1959. 135 Preben Kaarsholm, “Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa? Sufi Networks in South Africa, Mozambique and the Indian Ocean,” The Journal of African History 55, no. 2 (2014): 191–210, here 193. 136 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to unnamed recipient, April 2, 1957. 137 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to unnamed recipient, December 8, 1958. 138 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, September 29, 1957. 139 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets, 2nd ed., 337. 140 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, February 6, 1957. 141 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets, 2nd ed., 302. 142 Ibid., 304. 143 Mthembu read from a prepared script he preserved and sent to the NAD. PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Transcript of Mthembu’s address to unnamed meeting, Vryheid, Natal, October 11, 1959. 144 For a discussion of Champion’s career, see Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth Century Natal (Johannesburg, 1986), 74ff. 145 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Steyn, February 15, 1958. 146 Karen Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 (Athens, Ohio, 2008), 158ff. 147 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, The Agricultural Assistant, KwaMbonambi to Verwoerd, NAD, December 9, 1957. 148 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mkwanazi to SIO, September 7, 1958. 149 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to SIO, March 18, 1958. 150 The state’s restrictions on independent churches were entirely lifted by 1963. Cabrita, Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, 322–323. For more on the crisis facing independent churches in this period, see Bengt Sundkler’s interview with A. W. G. Champion, June 1958, cited in Sundkler, Zulu Zion and Some Swazi Zionists, 284. 151 PNA, NTS 1547 160/214, Shange to SNA, May 6, 1958. 152 Cabrita, Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, 296. 153 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Gwala to Minister of Native Affairs, November 10, 1953. 154 BSP, box 96, Sundkler to Schlosser, August 1, 1959; BSP, Correspondence Files, Holleman to Sundkler, August 12, 1959. Mthembu—and intriguingly A. W. G. Champion—took upon themselves the role of mediator in the dispute between Sundkler and Shembe, seeking “to convince Shembe that you [Sundkler] used [Messiah] in a technical sense (‘anointed one’) for classification purposes.” 155 BSP, Correspondence Files, Mkhize to Sundkler, August 9, 1965. 156 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, September 29, 1957. 157 Daniel Lephoko, “The Mission of Nicholas Bhengu in a Divided and Polarized Society” (M.A. thesis, University of Pretoria, 2005), 82. 158 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Potgieter, March 3, 1958. 159 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to SIO, August 30, 1958; PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Potgieter, March 3, 1958. 160 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Potgieter, March 3, 1958. 161 “Appendix B: ‘List of Native Separatist Churches as on August 1, 1945,’” in Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 354. 162 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, February 6, 1957. 163 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, December 27, 1956. 164 PNA, NTS 1480, file no. 1040/213, “Application of Apostolic Holy Salema in Zion of South Africa for recognition to NAD,” August 18, 1958. 165 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, December 27, 1956. 166 BSP, box 96, Mkhize to Sundkler, March 7, 1960. This was still the case in the 1970s. Swedish Lutheran missionary scholar Axel Ivar Berglund noted while meeting with independent church leaders on the Rand that “they all had it [Bantu Prophets] on their personal bookshelves.” A. I. Berglund, “Bengt Sundkler: Prophet among Prophets,” in Hallencreutz, Daring in Order to Know, 23–34, here 25. 167 KCL, Ilanga lase Natal, September 10, 1960. 168 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, October 9, 1956. 169 KCL, Ilanga lase Natal, January 15, 1958; KCL, Ilanga lase Natal, July 12, 1958. See also BSP, box 99, notebook 4, “To Dr BGM Sundkler by Mr P. Mp. Mkhize,” n.d., ca. 1960. H. Kenney, Verwoerd: Architect of Apartheid (Cape Town, 1980), 167–168. 170 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, December 27, 1956. 171 BSP, box 124, Mthembu to Sundkler, August 3, 1958; BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, May 26, 1958. 172 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, February 6, 1957. 173 BSP, box 115, Mthembu to Sundkler, September 30, 1957. 174 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Potgieter to Mthembu, June 17, 1958. 175 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, SIO to Mthembu, May 10, 1954. 176 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Mthembu to Steyn, March 21, 1955. 177 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Steyn to CIO, Pretoria, October 11, 1959. 178 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Potgieter to CIO, Pretoria, November 29, 1959. 179 PAD, IBAN P/2/M, Steyn to CIO, Pretoria, October 11, 1959. 180 KCL, Ilanga lase Natal [in isiZulu], August 23, 1958; KCL, Ilanga lase Natal [in isiZulu], September 10, 1960. This was indicative of a broader anxiety among ANC activists that their activities were monitored. La Hausse, “So Who Was Elias Kuzwayo? Nationalism, Collaboration and the Picaresque in Natal,” 490. 181 Nelson Tozivaripi Sambureni, “Working in the Apartheid City: Worker Struggles in Durban, 1959–1979” (M.A. thesis, University of Natal, Durban, 1994), 173. 182 1959 was a year of widespread protest and violence in Natal, much of it harnessed by the ANC to promote their cause. Kelly, “Bantu Authorities and Betterment in Natal,” 277–288. 183 KCL, Ilanga lase Natal [in isiZulu], September 10, 1960. 184 Carl F. Hallencreutz, “Doctor Missiologiae Upsaliensis,” in Hallencreutz, Daring in Order to Know, 5–22, here 16–17. 185 Manas Buthelezi, “Towards a Biblical Faith in South African Society,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 19 (June 1977): 55–58, here 57–58. 186 For a critique of independent churches as insufficiently engaged with Black liberation, see Desmond Tutu, “Black Theology/African Theology—Soul Mates or Antagonists?,” Journal of Religious Thought 32, no. 2 (1975): 25–33, here 32–33. 187 African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg (website), accessed December 31, 2019, https://www.uj.ac.za/faculties/humanities/aceps/Pages/default.aspx. 188 Savo Heleta, “Decolonizing Knowledge in South Africa: Dismantling the Pedagogy of Big Lies,” Ufahamu 40, no. 2 (2018): 47–65, here 48. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. 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TI - Writing Apartheid: Ethnographic Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge Production in Twentieth-Century South Africa
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhaa512
DA - 2020-12-29
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/writing-apartheid-ethnographic-collaborators-and-the-politics-of-yoC8oOLuKx
SP - 1668
EP - 1697
VL - 125
IS - 5
DP - DeepDyve
ER -