Umpumulo, place of rest: A nineteenth-century Christian Mission Station among the Zulus

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 99, 2007, Pages 140-157

  Hovland, Ingie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36249011881     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2007-007     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 2001);
2. and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986).
3. Shannon Sullivan, "Ethical Slippages, Shattered Horizons, and the Zebra Striping of the Unconscious: Fanon on Social, Bodily, and Psychical Space," Philosophy and Geography 7 (2004): 19.
4. Ibid., 10.
5. Ibid.
6. For a fuller picture of the Norwegian Missionary Society's establishment and activities in Southern Africa in the nineteenth century, see, e.g., Halfdan Sommerfelt, Den Norske Zulumission: Et Tilbageblik paa de første 20 Aar af det Norske Missionsselskabs Virksomhed (The Norwegian Zulu Mission: A Retrospective View of the first 20 Years of the Norwegian Missionary Society's Activity) (Christiania: Wm. Grams Forlag, 1865);
7. John Nome, ed., Det Norske Misjonsselskaps Historie i Hundre År (The History of the Norwegian Missionary Society for a Hundred Years), 5 vols. (Stavanger: Dreyers Grafiske Anstalt, 1943-49), including the chapter "Sør-Afrika" ("South Africa") by Olav Guttorm Myklebust, 3:5-187;
8. Jarle Simensen, ed., South Africa 1845-1906, vol. 1. of Norwegian Missions in African History (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986);
9. Torstein Jørgensen, Contact and Conflict: Norwegian Missionaries, the Zulu Kingdom, and the Gospel 1850-1873 (Oslo: Solum, 1990);
10. and Frederick Hale, Norwegian Missionaries in Natal and Zululand: Selected Correspondence, 1844-1900 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1997).
11. For an overview, see Norman Etherington, Preachers, Peasants, and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835-1880 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978).
12. On the nineteenth-century Zulu homestead, see John Lambert, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Scottsville: University of Natal Press, 1995).
13. Axel-Ivar Berglund, Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (London: Hurst and Company, 1976). Berglund, whose book is recognized as one of the seminal works on Zulu beliefs, was a faculty member at the Lutheran Theological College at Umpumulo during the 1960s.
14. Etherington, Preachers, Peasants, and Politics, 61.
15. Most notably, perhaps, this decision was followed by the Anglican bishop John William Colenso, who translated portions of the Bible into Zulu; see Jeff Guy, The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso, 1814-1883 (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1983), 48. The term was also used by the Norwegians, most importantly by Schreuder, who also translated portions of the Bible into Zulu.
16. Berglund, Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism, 93.
17. Aldin Grout, for example, was concerned with the layout of his Umvoti station and was proud to report no less than forty-eight "upright" houses there in 1864 (Etherington, Preachers, Peasants, and Politics, 117).
18. For a description of the layout and vision for Bishop Colenso's station at Bishopstowe, see Guy, The Heretic, 62-63.
19. NMT 1852/53:104, Larsen, Umpumulo, diary sent to the Board, December 1851-June 1852. The Norwegian Missionary Society's magazine was called Norsk Missions-tidende (Norwegian Mission Tidings), henceforth abbreviated as NMT. The magazine was published in Norwegian (translations here are my own), and can be found in the NMS Archives at the School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger, Norway.
20. NMT 1851/52:81, Oftebro to the Board, Umpumulo, June 25, and July 3, 1851.
21. See Clifton Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 136-38. Crais argues that British settlers' manor houses not only sustained social distance between the occupiers and "others" but that they also turned this social distance into habits of unequal social practice and surveillance. In this way the colonial culture was "carried through the wider landscape" (137).
22. Etherington, Preachers, Peasants, and Politics, 116.
23. NMT 1852/53:46, Oftebro to the Board, Umpumulo, March 26, 1852.
24. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 of Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 234.
25. Simultaneously, "native labor" time was being institutionalized; see Keletso Atkins, "'Kafir Time': Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labour Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Natal," Journal of African History 29 (1988): 229-44.
26. NMT 1855/56:87, Larsen to the Board, Umpumulo, June 20, 1855.
27. NMT 1852/53:108-113, Larsen, Umpumulo, diary sent to the Board, December 1851-June 1852.
28. NMT 1852/53:179, Larsen to the Board, Umpumulo, December 29, 1852.
29. Ibid.
30. On the importance of domestic objects, see Karina Hestad Skeie, "Building God's Kingdom: The Importance of the House to Nineteenth Century Norwegian Missionaries in Madagascar," in Ancestors, Power, and History in Madagascar, ed. Karen Middleton (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 71-101.
31. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (New York: Orbis, 1989), 5.
32. Ibid., 53.
33. Comaroff and Comaroff, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness;
34. see also their Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992);
35. and The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 of Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
36. Comaroff and Comaroff, Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness, 15.
37. J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
38. NMT 1858:95, Udland to the Board, Umpumulo, January 8, 1858.
39. NMT 1859:41, Larsen to the Board, Umpumulo, October 3, 1858.
40. NMT 1861:129, Udland to the Board, Umpumulo, report for the last quarter, 1860.
41. See discussion in Etherington, Preachers, Peasants, and Politics, 47-55.
42. Ibid., 37, 38, 103.
43. Ibid., 103-4.
44. Ibid., 67.
45. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
46. NMS Archives/Section: Home/Box 130/Jacket 4/Larsen to the Board, Umpumulo, May 8, 1854.
47. Sommerfelt, Den Norske Zulumission, 215.
48. NMT 1855/56:83, Schreuder to the Board, Entumeni, August 29, 1855.
49. Lars Berge, "Lars Larsen," in Hjem fra Kamppladsen: Livsbilleder af Vore Afdøde Missionærer og Kvindelige Missionsarbeidere i Zulu og paa Madagaskar (Home from the Battle Field: Life Portraits of Our Deceased Missionaries and Female Mission Workers in Zulu and on Madagascar), ed. A. Olsen (Christiania: Steen'ske Bogtrykkeri og Forlag, 1906), 38.
50. NMS Archives/Section: Home/Box 130/Jacket 4/Larsen to the Board, Umpumulo, May 8, 1854.
51. Sommerfelt, Den Norske Zulumission, 215.
52. NMS Archives/Section: Home/Box 130/Jacket 4/Larsen to the Board, Umpumulo, May 8, 1854.
53. Myklebust, "Sør-Afrika," 97.
54. NMT 1856/57:149, Schreuder to the Board, Entumeni, September 1856; see the material on Udland presented in Ingie Hovland, "Fieldnotes on Some Cockroaches at SOAS and in Stavanger, Norway," Anthropology Matters Journal, Dec. 1, 2004, no. 2004-2, http://www .anthropologymatters.com/journal/2004-2/hovland_2004_fieldnotes.htm.
55. Sanneh, Translating the Message, 53.
56. Comaroff and Comaroff, Christianity, Colonialism; and Consciousness, 206; emphasis in original.
57. Ibid.
58. Homi Bhabha introduces the hybrid and ambivalent "third space" in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994);
59. see also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
60. As hinted at in the intriguing article by Florence Bernault, "Body, Power, and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa," Journal of African History 47 (2006): 207-39.