Afrikaner Missionaries and the Slippery Slope of Praying for Rain
The Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries in Southern and Central Africa
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Rain prayers and ‘rainmaking’ have been much commented upon in respect to African religions including Christianity. This ritual practice was one of the issues that many colonial-era missionaries to Southern and Central Africa mentioned in their diaries and other materials. Their responses were often quite negative, but in certain cases there were attempts by missionaries to meet the indigenous discourse, if not exactly halfway, then at least in some manner by substituting Christian rain prayers for what was often seen as ‘heathen superstition’. This article concerns a much neglected group of missionaries in academic discourse, Afrikaners from the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Colony to wider Africa. It considers how they responded to indigenous requests or demands for rain prayers, and subtly poses the thesis that they were in some cases influenced and even convinced against their self-proclaimed biases to consider rain prayers from the indigenous point of view.
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2
See Robin Horton, ‘African Conversion’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41/2 (1971), 85-108, doi:10.2307/1159421.
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18
Brian Stanley, ‘The Missionary and the Rainmaker’, Social Sciences and Missions 27 (2014), 153 [145-162].
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Afrikaner Missionaries and the Slippery Slope of Praying for Rain
The Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries in Southern and Central Africa
In: ExchangeSearch for other papers by Retief Müller in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Rain prayers and ‘rainmaking’ have been much commented upon in respect to African religions including Christianity. This ritual practice was one of the issues that many colonial-era missionaries to Southern and Central Africa mentioned in their diaries and other materials. Their responses were often quite negative, but in certain cases there were attempts by missionaries to meet the indigenous discourse, if not exactly halfway, then at least in some manner by substituting Christian rain prayers for what was often seen as ‘heathen superstition’. This article concerns a much neglected group of missionaries in academic discourse, Afrikaners from the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Colony to wider Africa. It considers how they responded to indigenous requests or demands for rain prayers, and subtly poses the thesis that they were in some cases influenced and even convinced against their self-proclaimed biases to consider rain prayers from the indigenous point of view.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 418 | 73 | 11 |
| Full Text Views | 204 | 2 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 59 | 6 | 5 |
