Hate the Old and Follow the New: Khoekhoe and Missionaries in Early Nineteenth-Century Namibia.

Elbourne, Elizabeth

Hate the Old and Follow the New: Khoekhoe and Missionaries in Early Nineteenth-Century Namibia, by Tilman Dedering. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997. 205 pp. DM 76.

Tilman Dedering's magisterial exploration of the early nineteenth-century interaction between Khoekhoe (or Khoikhoi) groups and European missionaries, in the areas known to European contemporaries as Great and Little Namaqualand, is an important work. Its significance transcends the topic in hand, given the constraints imposed by relatively limited sources on historians of precolonial Namibia and of the northern region of what is now the Cape Province of South Africa, as well as gaps and artificial divides in the way the region has been studied.

The most important written records of this sparsely populated region in the early nineteenth century are missionary papers, notably those of the British-based London Missionary Society and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, active in the region before the mid-century advent of the Rhenish Missionary Society. Missionary records have, however, traditionally been distrusted as a source for the history of Africans in Namibia, for obvious reasons. One of Dedering's important innovations is to show that these under-utilised records provide invaluable information about local politics, environmental challenges, and the uses of religion. Most importantly, locals tried to use Christianity (and missionaries) to gain power for themselves and to broker trade relations with the Cape Colony. Missionary records are therefore important not only for what they incidentally reveal but because, argues Dedering, the politics of Christianity were a key variable in the early nineteenth-century history of the region -- not least because of missionaries' access to the colonial arms trade.

A second crucial innovation of Hate the Old, Follow the New is that Dedering looks at the history of people of at least partial Khoekhoe ancestry across the boundaries imposed by colonialism. This makes a great deal of sense given that environmental conditions imposed a nomadic lifestyle -- indeed, Dedering makes much of the fate which awaited missionaries who tried to create settled agricultural settlements according to their models of "civilization." Dedering usefully places his Namaqualand study in the broader context of Khoekhoe uses of mission Christianity across southern Africa; the Nama-speaking Khoekhoe of Namaqualand were aware, for example, of the economically more successful Griqua further to the east beyond the Orange River, who used missionaries to ally with the Cape Colony and tried to engage in what Robert Ross has memorably termed "Christian subimperialism" among the Tswana.

Partly in consequence of this methodological commitment, Dedering doesn't see groups (often "mixed-race") entering Namaqualand from the colony and elsewhere as different from the indigenous Nama as historians have tended to suggest. This is particularly relevant to the history of the so-called "Oorlams," interlopers who often had mixed white-Khoekhoe backgrounds, and used horses, guns, and gunpowder to gain regional hegemony. Dedering suggests that Nama groups themselves adopted similar strategies, as they too often survived by raiding in difficult economic circumstances, while Nama societies were more fissile than a reified dialectical model would suggest. In fact, the Oorlams groups were products of the very tendency of Khoekhoe societies to split into new groups and to incorporate a variety of peoples and new cultural techniques as necessity dictated. Dutch speaking, gun-wielding Ooorlams were scarcely the alien agents of capitalist penetration other historians (such as Brigitte Lau) have depicted. Rather, they exemplified broader Khoekhoe survival techniques. Dedering even suggests that Oorlam leaders spoke Dutch (often learned at mission stations), but many more followers than traditionally believed remained Nama speakers.

All of this is a blow at an older marxist historiography, as well as at more recent tendencies to look for dialectical cultural confrontations. There was no prelapsarian golden age before the advent of capitalism, and the region saw cultural intermingling before the advent of missionaries. Indeed, although Dedering certainly shows no sign of being influenced by postcolonial literary theory, one might apply the language of hybridity to his portrayal of mutable nomadic groups, some incorporating culture and bloodlines from Cape Dutch society, in a multicultural environment, as they met Dutch, German, and English-origin missionaries who had themselves migrated across oceans. Ironically, missionaries would become more racist by the mid-nineteenth century and more prone to create divides between "white" and "black" society; in the early nineteenth century they socialized with the converts with whom they had relationships of mutual dependence and occasionally married African women. Nineteenth-century colonial history is thus in part the story of the creation of boundaries and cultural distinctions.

Hate the Old, Follow the New has both the virtue and the defect of being wedded to the archives. In places the non-specialist may find the book hard going. One sometimes wishes that Dedering would indulge himself a bit more in his occasional bursts of imaginative empathy. More seriously perhaps, oral history seems under-used, as Dedering draws only on much earlier written reports of oral tradition. This is presumably because the time period is too remote, and perhaps the relevant groups too fractured by subsequent colonial brutality, for textured oral history; nonetheless, some account of the existing sources and of limitations on oral historical sources would have been useful. The account is relatively materialist. Some historians of religion will want to explore in more detail the emotional religious revivals described by Dedering, although others will welcome his reminder of the material interests associated with Christianity; certainly his evidence poses the fascinating conundrum of the relationship between religious consciousness and material interest.

The author sidesteps much (albeit not all) of recent controversy over the relative weight of the expansion of the Zulu kingdom versus that of colonial slavetrading and conquest in causing disruption in the southern African interior. Although the northwest was very far from the epicentre of the storm, Dedering does seem to hold some pieces of the puzzle some Nama raided, for example, in Griqua and Tswana territory, and experienced the same devastating impact of environmental catastrophe. This raises a final question was the early nineteenth century anomalous, or had the Nama previously experienced similar levels of hunger and low-level inter-group competition as a result? Was the war of all against all the precolonial norm, or the product of more local circumstances, such as the existence of a covert colonial arms trade and unusually severe climatic conditions in the early years of the nineteenth century?

Although in some respects, then, one wishes Dedering had been bolder, this is a remarkable piece of work about an under-studied region and time period. Its careful research and measured conclusions should continue to resonate in a range of fields.