Instrumentos para el control del motor

The responsibility of teaching fell to pastors and their practice aimed at making the indigenous people civilized and better workers, with literacy being used as a tool of power and control. The indigenous peoples’ ways of living and practices came to be considered by western societies as

27

being barbaric, pagan or satanic. The missionaries put asunder the things that hold the indigenous people together and instead forged and persuaded them to follow the Christian doctrine. They viewed the indigenous people as having a deficit which had existed before their arrival, resulting in them being pagans and uncivilized and therefore in need of remedy or treatment in the form of literacy. This resulted in the establishment of churches and schools as places where such

remediation could be provided to a privileged few, in the form of the generic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, the purpose of which was to produce docile, compliant workers who would be able to deliver as per their masters’ agenda, that of colonial annexation. The

proceeding paragraphs shows how missionaries entered and settled in Namibia with a Bible in the one hand and the gun in the other to establish their missions, build schools, convert locals and protect their subjects and their establishments.

2.2.1 Land occupation

According to Buys and Nambala (2003, p, 9), the London Missionary Society (LMS), which was founded in 1795 in England, began working in Namibia in 1805, moving north from the Cape Colony. Lau (1987, p. 4) points out that Little Namaqualand referred to the north-western areas of the Cape Colony, while the Great Namaqualand referred to the area beyond the Orange River (Namibia). She further reports that in 1805 missionaries Johann and Christian Albrecht entered the country of the Great Namaquas after crossing the Orange River. According to Lau, the Namaland in Southern Namibia was inhabited by the Nama, the Damara and the Bushmen, a diverse group of people. Buys and Nambala (2003, pp. 9-14) state that during October 1806 the Albrecht brothers of the LMS established the first permanent Christian mission at Warmbad in the south. At Warmbad the Albrechts immediately started a school, the first formal educational institute in Namibia. It was attended by children from the Bondelswarts and the Orlams clans of Jonker Afrikaner. The training was mainly religious and a preparation for baptism and a

Christian life. The training included games, reading and writing, singing for public worship and skills of masonry (brickwork) and agriculture. LMS policy required that its missionaries be self- supporting. In 1820 the LMS decided to discontinue its work in Great Namaqualand. In 1822 Schmelen, a LMS missionary married to a Nama wife, and who continued the mission work among the Nama people after the discontinuation of the mission, was asked to translate the New Testament into the Nama Language, which was duly printed in 1831.

28

All missionary activities of the LMS were taken over by the Wesleyans (Methodist missionary) in the 1830s, although the LMS continued to work in Namibia until 1840. Missionary successes started to be recorded at Noasanabis (now Leonardville) from 1842 to 1851. According to Lau (1987, p. 76), the missionaries acted as anchor for the community and many polities only

emerged as groups when a missionary came to stay or a church was built, or both. Lau (1987, pp. 77-78) further points out that these missionaries also played crucial roles, not only in establishing but also in maintaining permanent settlements by helping to set up agricultural production. Such large-scale agricultural production resulted in stable settlements able to protect it against raids, as the missionaries provided access to guns and ammunition. The missionaries also maintained a trade network with the Cape.

With the expansion of the Rhenish Missionary Society’s activities, both the London and the Wesleyan Missionary Societies decided to relinquish their activities in Namibia, leaving the missionary field entirely to the German missionary society. They were followed, from 1840 onwards, by German and Finnish Lutheran missionaries. The German Rhenish Lutheran Mission (Rhenish-of the river Rhine) was one of the largest missionary societies in Germany after their amalgamation on 23 September 1828, and the first missionaries were ordained and sent to South Africa during the same year. These missionaries started to migrate north through the barren and inhospitable regions of south-western Africa. Du Plessis (1965, p. 340) highlights the challenges of the missionary work during this period by citing Külz, who encapsulated this in a few

sentences:

With what endurance and energy did these first Rhenish missionaries work among the vagrant Namas, and among the proud Hereros, with their contempt for all White men. No disappointments, no losses, no dangers to life and limb could discourage them.

Repeatedly they recommenced their laborious work from the very start, for many years without visible outward results. For decades they were distressed and endangered by the racial wars between the Namaqua and the Bantu, without the least protection on the part of any State, and cast wholly upon themselves and their own slender material resources.

29

Katjavivi (1988, p. 6) argues that the German Rhenish Lutheran Mission believed in its own ‘civilizing’ mission, which centered on the promotion of European culture as much as on the Bible message itself. The Director of the Rhenish Missionary Society in the late nineteenth century, F. Fabri, saw mission work as ‘useful’ for trade or colonial annexation and one

particular missionary, C. G. Buttner, ‘strove zealously to promote German colonial government in South West Africa.’ According to Lau (1987, p. 119-120), the intention of the Rhenish

Mission Society was to destroy Jonker Afrikaner’s nascent state structure in order to weaken any local political power that might resist the forthcoming German annexation of the area.

2.2.2 Early childhood education

According to Haihambo et al. (2006: 9), early childhood education centers were first introduced by the missionaries during the colonial era. They were often church-based institutions that had an overall aim of introducing children to basic reading, writing and numeracy skills, while

socializing with peers who were not necessarily members of their clan. The children would be brought together at a central place and would learn some basic literacy skills through play and rhymes. These centers were generally known as kindergartens.

2.2.3 General education

The missionaries began educational work before the colonial governments. According to Prah (2009, p. 1) and Spolsky (2004, p. 50), the emergence of the majority of African languages, as written forms, and as we know them today, were made possible through the agency and the work of Christian missionary groups. The missionaries introduced European educational practices to the local communities where they started to work. Watson (1982, p. 13) and Storeng (1994, p. 72), see the conversion of the indigenous people to Christianity as the main purpose of the missionary societies. Their objective was to proselytize among the indigenous people, give prospective catechists a rudimentary education and change the cultural practices of Africans to conform to those associated with piety and order in Christian Europe. Towards these ends, they purposed to teach basic literacy so that pupils could read the Bible and memorize the catechism. This often resulted in the development of orthographies for local languages, pioneering

instruction in vernacular languages and the translating of the Bible into these same languages. As Katzao (1999, p. 21) points out, the missionaries learned the vernacular languages of the local people with whom they worked, developed orthographies, compiled dictionaries and text books

30

and translated the Bible so as to make it readable through the use of local languages. Stroud (2007, p. 26), stresses that the ‘regulation and knowledge of the indigenous languages was used as a control tool by the colonizers to insert itself on its subjects’ and we can see the translating and orthographic projects of the missionaries in this light. Indigenous languages were invented in standardized forms imagined by colonial linguists, rather than in ways that corresponded to the variety of local speech practices encountered by the linguists. Stroud further points out that in this way, colonial linguists provided the Western self with knowledge of subject peoples and the means to communicate in ways that were to the advantage of the colonizers and which rendered the colonial reality comprehensible to the European modern mind (Stroud, 2007, p. 27).

In line with Stroud, Prah (2009. p. 14) also explains that the missionary translators naturally imported their orthographic preferences, prejudices and biases into the work they produced. The way they wrote their home languages and assumed a close link between language and ethnicity, invariably affected how they wrote and developed grammars for African languages. He shows, for example, that despite the fact that the dialectal variants of Oshivambo are at least 95 percent mutually intelligible, the Oshikwanyama and Oshindonga each have different Bibles and a separate linguistic identity. The missionary religious linguistic discourse in Namibia as

elsewhere, e.g. in Mozambique (as explained by Stroud, 2007, p. 32) clearly served as a political tool aimed to change the cultural patterns of the indigenous people in line with European cultural practices, behavior and morality.

2.2.4 Concluding remarks

Before the Europeans started showing interest in Africa, Africans followed their own traditional cultural practices and religious beliefs. Western Christianity as a doctrine that aimed to win followers by spreading the gospel to others, saw the need to proselytize and convert Africans to Christianity. Missionaries discouraged the Africans from following their traditional religious beliefs which the missionaries considered to be barbaric, pagan or satanic practices and instead forged and persuaded them to follow the Christian doctrine. Versttraelen-Gilhuis (1992: 65) states that the history of the Christian missionary movement, which in large part paralleled the history of European expansion, has not yet been written from an African perspective. She argues that there was a need to shift the focus of interest ‘from the perspective of those who invaded Africa (whatever their motives have been)’, to ‘that of the Africans who responded (negatively,

31

positively or indifferently) to the new religion and culture’ (Versttraelen-Gilhuis, 1992, p. 70). There is a need for religious development before any encounter with Christianity and the changes that occurred in the course of interacting with Christianity to be studied if we are to point out the legacy of missionaries who were dispatched to Africa.

Ross (1986, p. 34) argues that depending on the particular strain a missionary subscribed to, they came to play various roles, and that ‘political and social reform was seen as part of, or adjuncts of, the Gospel by many evangelicals but not by all’. For example, Ross (1986, p. 33) argues that Protestant Missionary (LMS) activity appeared to coincide with the economic and political emergence of Britain as the dominant power in the world, and as a result, the Christian missions were viewed as the cultural and spiritual arm of European Imperialism.

Ross (1986) explains that all evangelicals shared a nominal opposition to slavery until around 1830, when the relationship of the Gospel to political and social issues gave rise to two groups, the ‘pietism’ that was quiet about slavery and the ‘evangelism’ that was not. The conviction of pietists was that political and social change was of no concern to dedicated Christians. Just as hurricanes and famines produced suffering among people which the good Christian should try to ameliorate as best he or she could, so with the results of political and social injustice. They held that to be concerned over bringing about the amelioration of social or political conditions was to stray from the path of Christian dedication, and such concern was, in any case, pointless because of the fallen state of this world. Evangelism, on the other hand, was open to a belief that social and political issues were central to the concerns of a Christian. Though many of their men and women were not directly influenced by these issues and the problems they raised, in another sense concern about social and political change was central.