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9 Buddhism in South Africa Michel Clasquin introduction Buddhism in South Africa is largely a late twentieth-century phenomenon. Nevertheless, it has not only a history but also a prehistory of sorts. Whether it will have a future will depend largely on its ability to relate to indigenous African thought.1 The story of South African Buddhism goes back to 1686. In that year, the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora dos Milagros was shipwrecked off the west coast of South Africa. The area at that time had been settled by Dutch expeditions and was known as the Cape Colony, named for the Cape of Good Hope. Among the newly stranded passengers were three Thai bhikkhus on their way to Europe as emissaries of the Siamese king. For four months, until a passing ship enabled them to continue their journey, they were quartered in the house of a free burgher.2 This was the first Buddhist presence ever in South Africa, but the moment passed without leaving a trace. There may have been other Buddhists at the Cape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there are few records and they left little evidence. For the citizens of the Cape Colony, the only information on Buddhism came from travel writings, often wildly fanciful ones like those by George Psalmanaazaar. By the nineteenth century , however, continuing Western explorations in Asia were producing far more reliable information on Buddhism, and literature produced at the Cape described Buddhism more or less accurately. But accurate description does not imply unbiased evaluation. Thus, a curious debate raged at the Cape that tried to place the historical Buddha in Africa rather than India. This debate seems to have started with the English orientalist William Jones, and was later echoed in the writings of Gutzlaff. Even when the theory was completely discredited elsewhere, a subliminal racism seems to have kept it alive in South Africa as late as the mid-twentieth century: “Delegates at a congress of the Suid-Afrikaanse Buro vir RasseAangeleenthede in 1956 learned from the ethnologist J.P. Bruwer that ‘The black Buddha of India originated in the physical image of the Negroid.’”3 152 If the Buddha himself was not an African, a new question was posed: perhaps there had been Buddhists in Africa? In 1911, James McKay noted artistic similarities between Chinese paintings and the rock paintings of the San (Bushmen) and suggested that the San must therefore be descended from a mixed Chinese/Egyptian people living in East Africa who would have been Buddhists!4 We can surmise that these attempts to conflate African and Asian otherness, many of which were promoted by missionaries, served primarily to accentuate the uniqueness and importance of the Christian message. Despite this, positive evaluations of Buddhism started to appear in South Africa by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mostly from Unitarians and Theosophists. From the first countrywide census in 1911 onward, Buddhists start to appear in the official records of the Union of South Africa. These official statistics have long been regarded with suspicion , mostly due to the persistent appearance of a few thousand black Buddhists whom no one has actually been able to find. It seems that statistical manipulations of data have skewed the picture fatally. Today, informal estimates of the number of Buddhists in South Africa vary from six thousand to as many as thirty thousand.5 early developments The first South African Buddhists came from areas where Buddhism was an established religion. There had been a large Chinese community in the Cape from the eighteenth century on,6 but it consisted mostly of transient sailors. Lasting settlement of Chinese in South Africa did not commence until the early twentieth century. Among these later settlers, conversion to Christianity was frequent and Buddhist practice slowly faded away. Until 1992, when the Nan Hua Temple near Bronkhorstspruit was established (Fo Kuang Shan school), there was no clearly defined Chinese Buddhist presence in South Africa. Another interesting development was the conversion to Buddhism of low-caste Hindus in Kwazulu-Natal province in the 1920s and 1930s. Strictly speaking, this is not an “ethnic” Buddhism—these people’s ancestors were not Buddhists—but one factor that caused them to adopt Buddhism as an alternative to Hinduism was that, unlike Christianity or Islam, Buddhism was at least of Indian origin. Calling their religion an “ethnic Buddhism” is therefore not too far off the mark. This process started in 1917 with the establishment of the...

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