‘Dear Mrs Brown’: social purity, sex education and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in early twentieth-century South Africa

AbstractThis article analyses the intersection between cosmopolitanism and racist ideologies in the faith healing practices of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. Originally from Illinois, USA, this organization was the period's most influential divine healing group. Black and white members, under the leadership of the charismatic John Alexander Dowie, eschewed medical assistance and proclaimed God's power to heal physical affliction. In affirming the deity's capacity to remake human bodies, church members also insisted that God could refashion biological race into a capacious spiritual ethnicity: a global human race they referred to as the “Adamic” race. Zionist universalist teachings were adopted by dispossessed and newly urbanized Boer ex-farmers in Johannesburg, Transvaal, before spreading to the soldiers of the British regiments recently arrived to fight the Boer states in the war of 1899–1902. Zionism equipped these estranged white “races” with a vocabulary to articulate political reconciliation and a precarious unity. But divine healing was most enthusiastically received among the Transvaal's rural Africans. Amidst the period's hardening segregation, Africans seized upon divine healing's innovative racial teachings, but both Boers and Africans found disappointment amid Zion's cosmopolitan promises. Boers were marginalized within the new racial regimes of the Edwardian empire in South Africa, and white South Africans had always been ambivalent about divine healing's incorporations of black Africans into a unitary race. This early history of Zionism in the Transvaal reveals the constriction of cosmopolitan aspirations amidst fast-narrowing horizons of race, nation, and empire in early twentieth-century South Africa.

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Talking about the Weather: Settler Vernaculars and Climate Anxieties in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

Environmental History ◽

10.1093/envhis/emx093 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 3-27 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Meredith McKittrick

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Early Twentieth Century

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Competition, Race, and Professionalization: African Healers and White Medical Practitioners in Natal, South Africa in the Early Twentieth Century

Social History of Medicine ◽

10.1093/shm/14.2.199 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 199-221 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

KAREN FLINT

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Medical Practitioners ◽

Early Twentieth Century

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Curriculum, knowledge, and the idea of South Africa

International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning ◽

10.18546/ijdegl.07.2.04 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 26-45

Author(s):

Crain Soudien

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Space ◽

Modern World ◽

Social Difference ◽

New Approach ◽

Higher Education System ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Curriculum Project

South Africa is an important social space in world history and politics for understanding how the modern world comes to deal with the questions of social difference, and the encounter of people with different civilizational histories. In this essay I argue that a particular racial idea inflected this encounter. One of the ways in which this happened was through the dominance of late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century positivism. In setting up the argument for this essay, I begin with a characterization of the nature of early South Africa's modernity, the period in which the country's political and intellectual leadership began to outline the kinds of knowledges they valued. I argue that a scientism, not unlike the positivism that emerges in many parts of the world at this time, came to inform discussions of progress and development in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. This was continued into the early twentieth century, and was evident in important interventions in the country such as the establishment of the higher education system and initiatives like the Carnegie Inquiry of 1933. The key effect of this scientism, based as it was on the conceits of objectivity and neutrality, was to institute suspicion of all other forms of knowing, and most critically that of indigenous knowledge. In the second part of the paper, I show that this scientism persists in the post-apartheid curriculum project. Finally, I make an exploratory argument, drawing on the concept of the 'transaction' in John Dewey, for a new approach to knowing.

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On Being in Time: Modern African Elites and the Historical Challenge to Claims for Alternative and Multiple Modernities

African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400404.003.0004 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Jacob Dlamini

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Historical Case ◽

Alternative Modernities ◽

Multiple Modernities ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines the ways in which African elites define their relation to the Europe with which they were confronted by the settlers in both appreciative and combative terms. It considers how scholars might use the idea of temporality — identified by both C. A. Bayly and Peter Wagner as being central to a subject's experience of modernity — to engage critically in debates about what Shmuel Eisenstadt has called ‘multiple modernities’ and Dilip Gaonkar has referred to as ‘alternative modernities’. Drawing on a specific historical case, involving a group of Christianised African elites in colonial South Africa from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the chapter demonstrates the importance of temporality as a dimension of what it meant to be modern.

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