Subversive subservience' : a comparative study of the responses of Tiyo Soga and Mpambani Mzimba to the Scottish missionary enterprise
Doctoral Thesis
2000
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University of Cape Town
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My thesis is that early African Christians engaged in critical dialogue with their missionary counterparts in a variety of ways and forms which served to challenge and enrich the Christianization process in South Africa, eventually giving rise to the emergence of African Christianity and theologies. My aim is to show that African Christians talked back in the long conversation with the European missionaries, ""a conversation full of arguments of words and images."" ¹ Early African Christians used various strategies and ways of responding to the missionary encounter ranging from overt to covert forms of resistance and negotiation. These were related to conditions on the ground. African Christian responses thus contradict any assertion of total conformity to the colonial missionary praxis. The classics debate at Lovedale, for instance, reveals that despite the apparent conformity and obedience to orthodoxy at the official level there was an awareness of ambivalence at a secondary (hidden) level. It is this awareness rather than the obvious ambivalence that is crucial to us.
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Bibliography: leaves 240-253.
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Njeza, M. 2000. Subversive subservience' : a comparative study of the responses of Tiyo Soga and Mpambani Mzimba to the Scottish missionary enterprise. University of Cape Town.