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82 “We Can’t Be Brothers” The Revolt of the Black Clergy “Sunlight and Shadow”: How Well Were the Missionaries Doing? In 1904, a rumor, eagerly transmitted by white enemies of missions, spread throughout South Africa and as far north as Rhodesia, that James Stewart, the principal of the Scottish secondary school at Lovedale, regarded his life’s work as a waste and Lovedale as a “splendid failure.” The rumor remained so insistent that the Anglican bishop of Lebombo approached Stewart on his deathbed, where he extracted an authoritative denial, and published it widely in the religious press.1 By 1900, when frontier violence and the dangers from disease had abated, many mission stations had become well-run and well-watered settlements, serene under a cloudless African sky. Free to choose their priorities and allot their time, missionaries could take satisfaction that their work was advancing the frontiers of “civilization.” The principal challenges they faced were now psychological and spiritual; the greatest danger, despondency, a sense of failure. Cut off culturally from Africans and professionally from most whites, thousands of miles from home, missionaries could find support only in other missionaries, themselves often convinced they had failed. Missionaries would arrive at missionary conferences “with slow and halting steps . . . [having spent] these three years in isolation, in disappointment, in discouragement, filled with a sense of the almost insuperable difficulty of their task, unrecognised, obscure, the objects of adverse criticism on the part of these to whom they might have looked for appreciation and sympathy, and with no tokens of visible success to cheer them.”2 In Natal, as late as 1886, the missions run by Nonconformist English-speakers had fewer than 100 African church members per missionary.3 For all of southern Africa (including the long “occupied” Western and Eastern Cape), there were just under 150.4 With quieter conditions in the countryside, stations no longer attracted refugees seeking security or a new life, and Christianity was much less an exciting novelty. An “increasing number of people baptized in infancy . . . never become converted or keep the vows of their baptism.”5 Some African Christian communities were settling into patterns of indifference and conformity common in Europe . In 1909, James Henderson, Stewart’s successor as the Lovedale principal, reported that in the Lovedale district, under continuous missionary “occupation” 6 The Revolt of the Black Clergy 83 since 1820, almost two-thirds of Africans claimed some Christian affiliation, but “those who can be regarded as sincerely and actively believers does not exceed 10 per cent.” “Superstition” was rife, even among Christians; so were dishonesty and sexual impurity.6 Yet in the “older mission fields” decline often co-existed with success. As missionaries increasingly entrusted evangelism to “our [African] lay preachers, untrained , and sometimes illiterate men,”7 the gospel spread to nearby regions, and Christian communities sprang up only indirectly connected with the mission station itself. A pattern of “dead trunk, live branches” appeared—a stagnant or declining church at the mission station, with lively and growing “outstations” and “preaching places.” When, in 1894, W. C. Wilcox of the American Board took over the Umvoti (Groutville) station in Natal, which had been founded decades earlier by the pioneer Aldin Grout, he “found a number of children and a few grown people scattered over the church mostly in a fringe around the sides while the body of the church was empty. Owls and bats had found lodging there.” The congregation was marked by “gross indifference and petty feuds.” The mission resembled an ancient church in Europe, with neighbors indifferent to its religious function but devoted to its history. Old men swapped affectionate anecdotes about Grout and subscribed money for a memorial. “But what seemed sad was that among all these old men who remembered and extolled Mr. Grout and were anxious to build this monument, not one was now a member of the church.”8 Though the detailed picture of South African missions was frequently one of “sunlight and shadow” (a favorite missionary metaphor), the broader picture of Protestant missions worldwide suggested triumph. In “Dawn in the Dark Continent ,” his 1902 Duff Missionary Lectures, James Stewart told a British audience that a “survey of the Missionary Situation of To-day would lead us to the belief that it is better, more encouraging, and more full of real results than at any time since the days of the Apostles. . . . Never before has there been, first, so large an amount of general missionary interest and activity; nor...

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