‘The Rebellion From Below’ and the Origins of Early Zionist Christianity
ABSTRACT This article argues that Zionist Christianity emerged in South Africa out of the peasant revolt that occurred in the Boer Republics during and after the South African War. Using the experiences of early Zionist leaders Daniel Nkonyane and Engenas Lekganyane, the article demonstrates the continuity of their theology with the ideology of the ‘Rebellion From Below’ first described by Jeremy Krikler. The early Zionists, like their predecessors, were primarily interested in recreating a world based on communal politics and land ownership – a world without rents, landlords, or white supervision.
The Power Beyond: Mission Strategies, African Conversion and the Development of a Christian Culture in the Transvaal
During the nineteenth century pietistic missionaries from the Hermannsburg and Berlin Mission Societies established more than fifty mission station among the Sotho and the Tswana throughout the Transvaal. These mission stations became centres of social and religious interaction. On the mission stations christianity and the world views compatible with it gradually took root among a growing number of converts while, at the same time, missionaries' families adapted to settler society. For most of the period under review, formal conversions to Christianity remained small in number, yet Christian values and institutions became prevalent features among African societies long before Christianity emerged as a majority belief in its new surroundings. Missionary evangelical strategies and African conversions to Christianity were tested in the context of South African colonial politics and economic transformations. While in the Transvaal Christianity offered little scope for explicit political opposition, it opened up major fields of cultural innovation which, in due time, became the basis for new articulations of African social aspirations. This study explores a mine of unpublished information Hermannsburg and Berlin mission archives provide. It attempts to prove that the detail we can build on Africans' experiences with Christianity is considerable if we carefully browse the riches of the mission archives.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.