Below is the text of ‘The WHITE REVOLUTIONARY AS MISSIONARY”. It was carried in New Frank Talk, critical essays on the Black condition, No 5, January 2010. A comment by Andile Mngxitama and poem by Aryan Kaganof follow after the main text.
The White Revolutionary As Missionary
Contemporary Travels and Researches in Caffraria
I.
“Your Missionaries have dived into that mine from which we were told no valuable ore or precious stones could be extracted; and they have brought up the gem of an immortal spirit, flashing with the light of intellect, and glowing with the hue of Christian graces”
So reads Reverend Richard Watson’s inscription opposite the frontispiece to Stephen Kay’s 1834 tome, Travels and Researches in Caffraria, describing the character, customs and moral condition of the tribes inhabiting that portion of Southern Africa. (Harper Bros, New York)
This book is a lump of treasure. Small and thick with a worn, green spine carrying raised letters, it feels weightier to the hands than its dimensions suggest. Inside, the volume has 444 foxed, moist pages as well as five plates depicting regal black women and ox-wagons fording rivers. It contains a foldout map of an oddly shaped South African shoreline petering out into an interior vaguely containing drinking holes, slave markets and Koranna and Bushmen “wandering thinly”. The prose itself is packed into long paragraphs, pages long, that warrant, as if possessed of a long gray beard, that whatever tales they tell, whether wisdom or folly, these tales stand on their content and seek no indulgence by being friendly with an easy reader. (more…)