Abstract
It is established knowledge that one of the greatest needs in scholarship on Christian mission is research not only into the reception history of White and Euro-American missionary endeavors in the rest of the world, but moreover regarding indigenous agency within the mission work itself. It is in this latter regard where The Evangelists makes its contribution.
The Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) of South Africa is an anomalous case in the history of missionary-sending churches worldwide. This is a church that, despite its name, has been anchored in African soil since the seventeenth century. I use the word anchored here to convey the DRC’s connection to Africa as opposed to a metaphor like rootedness, because for much of its history the majority Dutch-Afrikaner membership attempted as far as possible to negate any significant Africanization of their ethnic and religious identity, despite, perhaps ironically, adopting the terms Afrikaans and Afrikaner over time to distinguish themselves from their Dutch ancestry.
During the period of adopting such apparently Africa-oriented terminology these white Dutch descendant colonists also became increasingly race-conscious and white supremacist in outlook. Perhaps as a partial consequence of such developing sentiments the DRC did not enter into missionary projects aimed at the general populace of southern Africa with any great enthusiasm until the middle to late nineteenth century, opting instead for the most part to be a church for white colonists. When missionary work finally got underway this was only made possible because the church had instituted a form of ecclesiastical apartheid whereby black and ‘coloured’ converts could be accommodated in racially designated church formations.
The anomalous and often inglorious history of mission in the DRC is a story in need of scholarly attention from different directions. In The Evangelists retired missionary and anthropologist, P. J. Jonas takes the remarkably untrodden path of considering primary source material regarding African evangelists employed in the DRC mission during the twentieth century in what used to be the Cape Province of South Africa.
The first five chapters usefully set up the context in which these evangelists operated by considering inter alia the legacy of the nineteenth century, an older tradition of evangelists in the DRC’s mission enterprises in other regions of Africa such as today’s Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, the recruitment and training of evangelists for work in the Cape Province, as well as general expectations and conditions of their employment which theoretically occurred in partnership with White “missionaries.” Readers should be aware that Black workers in the DRC mission were always characterized as evangelists and their White colleagues, who were also their supervisors in real terms, were termed missionaries.
The bulk of the book from chapter 6 onwards, comprising a 400-page section in its entirety, constitutes a description of the more than 500 “evangelists” who worked in the Dutch Reformed Mission during the twentieth century. In this process, Jonas presents an important trove of information in the sense that names of such workers are noted along with other existing documentary data about them as found in the Dutch Reformed Church Archive. The data is presented according to regions of the Cape Province in which they were active, indicated as Transkei, Ciskei, Western Cape, and Northern Cape. This is further subdivided into decades during the course of the twentieth century when the workers entered the field.
Since the above information is presented in the form of direct quotations with only very limited commentary and interpretation from the author, and when this does occur typically in cases where the evangelist in question was personally known to Jonas, the book presents itself mainly as a source document. In this sense The Evangelists is an undeniably valuable text since it constitutes the first attempt by any researcher to bring to light information regarding these Black Christian workers within the Dutch Reformed context in apartheid-era South Africa.
Yet it must be admitted that this particular form of presentation makes for a somewhat frustrating reading experience. The reader is not aided in any way regarding how to make sense of the massive amounts of data presented in these pages. Potentially, future researchers may find many gems worthy of further exploration in this book but precisely how this discovery might occur is less clear since there is no attempt at thematic division or presentation in the book itself.
Jonas mentions in the foreword that he also collected numerous sermons and meditations preached by the evangelists, but he states that these could not be included in the present publication because it was already a very thick book, and such material would require too much in the way of analysis. However, most readers would likely have been more interested in sermons and their analyses rather than raw data about when a person began and ended work at a certain place or requests for transfers from one place to another, which were sometimes granted and sometimes not, and so forth. This type of information presented without much context might appear rather arbitrary, but such is the material that constitutes much of the book.
A reader might well wonder what to make of all of this, especially if the reader is not already familiar with the subject. Sermon analyses would have provided the reader a tangible glimpse into the theological framework within which these evangelists operated. That might have been an important key to unlocking the significance of The Evangelists. As things stand, this reader at least was unable to find a workable key for unlocking much of the information in these pages, because, regrettably, the text is largely unreadable from one section to the next since it follows neither a narrative flow nor an interpretive structure.
Despite the difficulty this reader found in reading the text, The Evangelists is still recommendable as an important book because it ventures into unchartered territory, which is undoubtedly a breakthrough in research on twentieth-century South African church history.