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103 7 The “Native Question” and the Benevolent Empire While missionaries were debating segregation in the church, South African settlers were asking whether their interests as whites required segregation in the broader society. Africans who were flooding the burgeoning cities offered whites new supplies of cheap labor, and simultaneously threatened their social and political hegemony. Missionaries, too, discerned new opportunities and dangers in African urbanization: newly concentrated populations offered a field for efficient evangelization, but also the danger of moral, social, and even physical degeneration among African converts. In 1903, shortly after the British had conquered the Afrikaner Republics in the Anglo-Boer War, Lord Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner, appointed the South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) to make recommendations on “native policy” for the eight British colonies in southern Africa. Until then, there had been little intercolonial consultation, much less agreement, on how best to govern and exploit the African majority of the region. In the following year, the missionaries organized the first General Missionary Conference (GMC), which, like SANAC, was intended to discuss issues concerning Africans on a regional, intercolonial plane. Many missionaries hoped that it would become a powerful missionary voice in the emerging debate on the “Native Question.” “One of the Most Striking Official Documents Ever Published” The South African Native Affairs Commission was chaired by Sir Godfrey Lagden , the son of a parish priest and son-in-law of a former Anglican bishop of Pretoria. A colonial official with extensive experience in Basutoland and the Transvaal, Lagden was generally sympathetic to missions.1 The commission was composed chiefly of English-speaking administrators and parliamentarians, with only two Afrikaners and no blacks among its eleven members. It interviewed 256 individuals and groups, many at length, analyzed 209 written responses to a questionnaire, and, in 1905, issued its findings and recommendations. The massive, five-volume report established the baseline for the twentieth-century “Grand Tradition of inquiries into the ‘Native Question.’”2 The historian John Cell has argued persuasively that although SANAC rarely if ever employed the word “segregation,” “the general philosophy of white su- 104 Benevolent Empire and Social Gospel premacy, as well as all or most of the parts of the new [segregationist] order” were reflected in its report. In Cell’s view, the commission helped crystallize ideas of diverse origins into a segregationist ideology that, after the Unification of South Africa in 1910, would become a cliché of white political thought. Among its clearly segregationist recommendations were separate voting rolls and differentiated education for whites and blacks, as well as a definitive demarcation of African reserves for separate occupation. Somewhat less persuasively, Cell, along with Adam Ashforth, contended that SANAC’s principal objective was to find African labor for capitalist enterprises, above all the Transvaal gold mines.3 Yet, on the surface at least, its report seemed concerned with much more than black labor . Only about a half-dozen of the 256 oral witnesses were Transvaal mining officials , and only 11 of the 209 who submitted written evidence employed African labor, except on farms.4 Of the report’s ninety-eight pages of recommendations, only seven referred to labor at all.5 In fact, the commissioners themselves considered that African land tenure was “perhaps the most important” of their terms of reference.6 Like the missionaries , they assumed that most Africans lived in rural areas, either on white farms or insulated from the white economy. Also like the missionaries, they saw the erosion of African culture in contact with “civilization” as an urgent administrative problem. Thus, their recommendations dealt with “Native law,” administration , education, liquor, taxation, and political representation; they devoted twice the space to church and family as to labor. For commissioners and missionaries alike, the “Native Question” was seen as a loosely linked set of administrative dilemmas encountered in governing Africans, regulating their culture, and exploiting their labor on behalf, not only of the mines, but of whites in general.7 Of those persons interviewed by SANAC or filling out its questionnaires, about one in five was a missionary, an administrator of a missionary institution, or a clergyman. The commissioners treated white clergy and missionaries with respect , African clergy (including Ethiopians) more brusquely. They concluded that neither laws nor any “secular system of morality” could stave off the “demoralization ” of Africans under colonialism. The “one great element for the civilisation of the Native is to be found in Christianity,” and, therefore, “regular moral and religious instruction should be given in...

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