Christian Conversion and Colonial “Native Policy”: The Role of Missionaries in Formulating Reservation Policy in German Southwest Africa

This article examines how German Protestant missionaries to the Herero people influenced colonial “native policy” in German Southwest Africa in the years leading up to the Colonial War of 1904 to 1907. By the late 1890s, burgeoning European settlement increasingly displaced the Herero from their traditional territory. While colonial officials promoted more settlement, missionaries had developed a concept of conversion that linked Christianization with living in self-sufficient agricultural communities, and hoped to place limits on Herero displacement. Thus, missionaries and colonial officials engaged in protracted political negotiations over the creation of inalienable “native reservations” for the Herero. I show that missionaries’ model of Herero conversion prompted them to promote an alternative mode of settler colonialism that would make room in Southwest Africa for self-sufficient Herero settlements. Prior to the Colonial War, missionaries succeeded in convincing the colonial government to begin creating reservations, thus shaping colonial policy according to missionary priorities.

Lineages of Hope and Despair

Literary and political expressions of the liberal dream of freedom from the 1880s to the 1970s are analysed in the opening chapter. The liberal dream’s lineage in political discourse is analysed in Cecil John Rhodes’s dreams of unifying South Africa in the 1890s; Olive Schreiner’s political journalism from the 1880s to the 1910s; the ANC’s Bill of Rights of 1923; H. Selby Msimang’s pamphlet The Crisis (1936); R. F. A. Hoernlé’s lectures South African Native Policy and the Liberal Spirit (1939); the ANC’s African Claims in South Africa (1943); the ANC’s Freedom Charter (1955); and the Liberal Party’s Blueprint for South Africa (1958). In juxtaposition with these political texts, the following literary texts articulating the liberal dream of freedom are analysed: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1890); J. A. D. Smith’s The Great Southern Revolution (1893); Archibald Lamont’s South Africa in Mars (1923); George Heaton Nicholls’s Bayete! (1923); S. E. K. Mqhayi’s U-Don Jadu (1929); Arthur Keppel-Jones’s When Smuts Goes (1947); Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948); Lewis Sowden’s Tomorrow’s Comet (1951); Garry Allighan’s Verwoerd —The End (1961); Anthony Delius’s The Day Natal Took Off (1963); Karel Schoeman’s The Promised Land (1972); and Jordan Ngubane’s Ushaba: The Hurtle to Blood River (1974).