Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony

Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895

S. Duff

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137380944
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

This book opens up histories of childhood and youth in South African historiography. It looks at how childhoods changed during South Africa's industrialisation, and traces the ways in which institutions, first the Dutch Reformed Church and then the Cape government, attempted to shape white childhood to the future benefit of the colony.

1

A Changing Church: Childhood, Youth, and Dutch Reformed Revivalism

In 1893 Andrew Murray jun., the moderator of the DRC, reminded his fellow clergymen that the future of the church ‘grootendeels afhangt van het welslagen van den arbeid aan de jeugd!’ (depends largely on the success of work with the youth).¹ This observation was by no means unique among nineteenth-century evangelicals. After all, the American evangelical minister and author of several influential child-rearing texts John S.C. Abbott remarked to mothers in 1856: ‘The brightest rays of the millennial morn must come from the cradle.’² Children and family life were not only central to the Christian society envisioned by evangelicals, but the conversion of children was also crucial to evangelical churches’ work. Children could be made into the Christian adults of the future. Ideally, to paraphrase the title of one of Murray’s best-selling books, children should be raised for Christ: parents should ensure that their children were brought up to be Christians. But children could also be converted through other means: in Sunday schools, at special sermons, or during revivals. However, as Murray and his fellow DRC clergymen discovered, children and young people could themselves cause revivals. Their involvement was crucial to the 1860 Great Revival, the first religious awakening to sweep nearly all of the DRC’s congregations in the nineteenth century, and which had a transformative effect on the church.

It is for this reason that Murray’s point about the future of the DRC being bound up with its efforts to evangelise among the Cape’s youth is so significant. Children and young people were pivotal to the DRC’s transformation into an evangelical church in 1860, and their involvement in later revivals was critical to the church’s evangelical work in the second half of the nineteenth century. An analysis of why some children and young people became involved in these revivals also opens up new ways of understanding how the social and economic change which produced the conditions in which revivals were likely to occur also impacted on the youth. As the following chapter will discuss, childhood and youth changed in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Cape. Revivals offer one way of thinking about this change.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the profound change that the DRC underwent during the early and middle parts of the nineteenth century: from a socially and theologically moribund organisation to a church at the very centre of, particularly, white Dutch-Afrikaans society in the colony’s towns and villages throughout the colony. Beginning with an analysis of how a group of Scottish-born and American- and European-trained ministers set to work to remake the DRC in the image of Protestant evangelical churches abroad, the chapter then turns to a discussion of the role of youth in the 1860 Great Revival. Although initially alarmed by the apparently uncontrolled outpouring of religious enthusiasm among the church’s youngest members, DRC ministers soon initiated means to harness this religiosity for the good of the church. As the final section argues, later revivals were more carefully controlled and patrolled by ministers. Youth religious experience needed to manifest itself in ways that would not challenge church or social hierarchies.

I

The DRC’s embrace of evangelicalism occurred within the context of the worldwide religious revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Revivalist or reform movements within Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism were a response, variously, to industrialisation, imperial rule, and the consolidation of state power.³ In South Africa, missionaries offered societies whose ways of life were disrupted by conquest and industrialisation, a means of coping with this massive and often traumatic change. Similarly, the DRC’s incorporation of revivalist preaching and other strategies borrowed from evangelical churches abroad – such as prayer meetings, visits to congregants at home, and missionary societies – in the middle decades of the century met with an enthusiastic response from the church’s members. An evangelical DRC seemed to help its members to make sense of the disruption caused by the colony’s economic expansion, urbanisation, mass immigration, disease, and drought. Put another way, DRC evangelicalism was both produced by and a response to the emergence of a colonial modernity in the Cape.

Ironically – for a church the majority of whose members were Dutch-Afrikaans – the DRC’s evangelical turn was made possible by the advent of British rule at the Cape. Under the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company), the activities of the DRC were limited. Unwilling to encourage the development of a colonial civil society, with the exception of a few missionaries, the DRC was the only church permitted to operate in the Cape under the VOC. It was entirely under the authority of the Amsterdam classis (governing body), and had only five churches which shared two or three ministers between them. Ministers were discouraged from taking active roles within colonial society, and levels of church attendance were low.⁴ The primary function of the DRC was to act as a social boundary keeper and indicator of respectability. Being baptised into the DRC was as much a signifier of ethnic or cultural identity as it was a marker of individuals’ religious beliefs.⁵

Under British rule, the DRC, Church of England, and other, smaller Christian denominations received small amounts of state aid. The Cape government contributed to ministers’ salaries and paid for the upkeep of church buildings. Because of its size, the DRC was the major beneficiary of this arrangement, establishing new congregations and building new churches in the Cape countryside and, through this, becoming a uniquely powerful force among, particularly, white communities in the colony’s interior.⁶ In 1822 eight Scottish ministers arrived to fill the growing number of vacant livings in DRC parishes. In the absence of a local theological seminary, they were brought to the Cape as part of Lord Charles Somerset’s Anglicisation policies. The DRC and the Church of Scotland stemmed from the same reformed tradition, and Somerset hoped that men like Andrew Murray sen., Colin Fraser, William Robertson, and George Thom would encourage their Dutch-Afrikaner congregations to learn English and to educate their children in the colony’s government-funded schools, all of which were now English-medium.⁷ Partly because these Scotsmen were sent to rural congregations, they were integrated into Dutch-Afrikaans society, learning to speak Dutch and marrying local women. Murray sen., for example, settled in the rural village of Graaff-Reinet with his Cape-born Dutch wife, Maria Stegmann.⁸

These men arrived at the Cape enthused with the evangelicalism that was sweeping Britain during the period, and slowly began to remould the DRC into the kind of evangelical church for which they had agitated in Scotland.⁹ Like other Protestant evangelicals, they were theologically conservative, read the Bible literally, and positioned Christ’s redeeming work as the heart of Christianity, encouraging both ministers and congregants to participate actively in their congregations and their communities, and to seek out and convert the unsaved and the unbelieving.¹⁰ They did not distinguish between private faith and public activity – between church attendance on Sundays and the everyday life of the working week – and insisted that congregants integrate their Christianity into every aspect of their lives. Even church members who had been christened at birth went through a process of spiritual conversion, and it was this public confession of faith that held evangelical Christians to account: their behaviour both within and without the church was under scrutiny from both ministers and fellow Christians.

To these ends, Murray sen. and his colleagues worked to grow the DRC, both in terms of the church’s membership and in terms of the place it occupied within the lives of its members. They extended the reach of the church by founding 18 new parishes, encouraged regular church attendance, and opened Sunday schools. They strengthened and reinforced the DRC’s tradition of huisbesoek (home visiting): ministers’ regular weekly or monthly visits to each member of their congregation. Huisbesoek not only monitored the regularity of congregants’ church-going, but also allowed ministers unprecedented power to comment on members’ domestic and private lives. Ministers were required to fill out weekly ledgers which listed families they had visited, how many children of school-going age were present in each household, and which school and Sunday school they attended.¹¹ As the editor of the Church of England’s Cape Church Monthly observed, this custom lent DRC ministers considerably more power than their colleagues from other churches. He grumbled that ‘Dutch colonists have a respect, sometimes almost servile for their clergy that is entirely wanting in their English fellows.’¹² Indeed, to invoke E.P. Thompson on the appeal of Methodism to the English working class during the Industrial Revolution, the DRC ‘was more than a building, and more than the sermons and instructions of its minister’. Unlike the Church of the Province of South Africa (CPSA), whose congregations tended to live and work in the colony’s towns, and, thus, closer to their ministers,¹³ DRC ministers, similar to their Methodist counterparts in England, regularly ‘tramped several miles after work to attend small functions at outlying hamlets’.¹⁴ The church lived in the activities and work of its ministers and members. Although the CPSA did organise church-related societies, their impact on more dispersed urban populations was less than that on the DRC’s mainly close-knit rural communities.¹⁵ DRC ministers believed that, as they were bringing the faithful more closely into the ambit of the church, they were also remaking the DRC. The immigrant ministers of the 1820s organised the church’s first independent synod in 1824, signalling that the DRC itself was emerging as a more self-aware and socially engaged organisation. Importantly, this nineteenth-century evolution of the DRC was linked closely to the founding of new parishes – something made possible by the Cape’s growing prosperity.

This expansion of the Cape’s economy fuelled the founding of new towns and villages in the interior of the colony.¹⁶ Each of these was built around a church, the vast majority of which belonged to the DRC. The DRC’s original six parishes created in 1795, all of which were centred in Cape Town or the south-western Cape, had grown to 25 in 1840, 36 in 1850, and 64 by 1860.¹⁷ Andrew Murray sen., moderator of the DRC between 1847 and 1862, oversaw a church which employed more ministers in more parishes than even 30 years previously, and which possessed the reach and the financial means to broaden its involvement in education, to sponsor missionaries, and to build its own theological seminary in 1859.¹⁸ (Its first two lecturers were N.J. Hofmeyr and John Murray, the eldest son of Murray sen.) The DRC was also the Cape’s biggest church in terms of membership: in 1875, roughly two-thirds of people categorised as white belonged to the DRC, and altogether almost a quarter of the total population described themselves as DRC congregants. Although the DRC only began to identify specifically as a volkskerk – as the church of an ethnically distinct Dutch Afrikaner nation – in the 1890s, before then it played an important role in defining a broad group of people who could best be described as Dutch-Afrikaans. The compilers of the 1875 Census included membership of the DRC among the criteria used to identify the ‘Dutch’ portion of the white population.¹⁹ The DRC established schools – and mainly girls’ schools for middle-class Dutch-Afrikaner children; Dutch-Afrikaner children and young people attended its Sunday schools and other children’s societies; Dutch-Afrikaans women could join women’s organisations from the early 1880s onwards and were responsible for organising DRC fundraising bazaars, a major feature of rural living.

Even if it was dominated by Dutch Afrikaners, the DRC’s congregations – like most settler churches – were racially and ethnically mixed, and the church’s shifting attitude towards race was linked closely to the profound social change occurring in the Cape. Although legislation ameliorating the lot of slaves and Khoe labourers – culminating in Ordinance 50 in 1828, which freed the Khoe from coercive labour, and the abolition of slavery in 1834 and 1838 – was rolled out in the 1820s and 1830s, the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1841) and Act (1856) were introduced subsequently to control the movement of black labour within the colony. In the colony’s eastern districts, a series of wars with the Xhosa and Khoe gradually extended the frontiers of the Cape – a process accelerated to some extent by the cattle-killing in 1856–57, a catastrophic movement which caused thousands to starve to death and radically weakened the Xhosa politically.

In the Cape’s south-western areas – those most profoundly affected by the emancipation of the slaves – freed people flocked to Cape Town and to mission stations seeking shelter and to reconstitute fragmented families. As an evangelical church, the DRC was interested in mission work, an endeavour in which it lagged behind other Protestant and Presbyterian churches. One of the key questions for DRC ministers was whether new converts – most of whom were black, many of them former slaves – should simply be incorporated into existing parishes and congregations, or should be made to join a new missionary church. A complicating factor in this decision was the fact that, like other Cape churches, several DRC congregations were racially mixed. While black congregants possessed lower status than white members and some congregations required black members to remain at the back of the church during services, several churches had mixed membership until at least the 1880s.²⁰ The church’s leadership was opposed to racial segregation and was far more preoccupied with a series of tussles between theologically liberal and conservative faction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• On Terminology, Orthography, and Translation
• Introduction
• 1. A Changing Church: Childhood, Youth, and Dutch Reformed Revivalism
• 2. Changing Childhoods: Making Middle-Class Childhood and Youth in the Nineteenth-Century Cape
• 3. Raising Children for Christ: Child-Rearing Manuals, Sunday Schools, and Leisure Time
• 4. The Crying Need: Dutch Reformed Responses to the Education Crisis of the 1870s
• 5. Saving the Child to Save the Nation: Poverty, Whiteness, and the Destitute Children Relief Act
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index