The purpose of this article is to analyze the origins, dimensions, and effects of African humanism—here defined as the ideological commitment to individualism, nonracialism, nonviolence, and universalism in the settler environment of South Africa from 1850 to 1920. The article explores the attitudes, goals, and actions of the mission-educated African preachers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, businessmen, and clerks, in relation to the Utopian world of missionaries, humanitarians, and the traditionalist work of the African masses among whom they lived and worked as well as the colonialist world of racism, exploitation, and oppression.
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