Blood ground: Colonialism, missions, and the contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 [Hardcover]

In outline, this book is about the effects that British missionaries, the British and Dutch colonial projects, and the Khoekhoe (Khoikhoi) peoples of what is now South Africa had on each other, in the period 1799-1853. From the jacket copy we learn the following: "[the author] argues that it is symptomatic of the ambiguities of this relationship that many Christian Khoekhoe ultimately rebelled against the South African colony." If God-fearing Khoekhoe could be spurred to war by ambiguity, how does the author expect her readers to react to casus belli like this: "Khoekhoe conversions to Christianity disturbed existing power relationships at the Cape, to take just one example, because they disrupted the grammar of what was 'said' with the language of Christianity about 'whiteness' as a religious category." Presumably the author means by this only the following: as more and more Khoekhoe converted to Christianity, it became harder and harder for settlers to justify exploitation or oppression of them on the grounds that they were a race of heathens. And, to translate the further discussion, dam_ if they weren't going to find some other way. If one is going to go quote-mark happy, as the author does in this book, shouldn't the quote-marks be on 'disrupted', 'grammar' and 'language' instead? Sentences like this are sprinkled throughout the book.

Likewise, the book is politically correct in the extreme. Presumably much of this is just the price, or is it the cost, of entry into the author's professional circle. But must we endure the spectacle of a scholar apologizing for using 'the Enlightenment' to refer to the Enlightenment? The author does not realize how hypocritical this is. If she were to be consistent, she would likewise apologize for using 'Khoekhoe' to designate the Khoekhoe, and not for the imprecision or sexism (she already does that): the word means "men of men", or some other such self-congratulatory pap, in the Khoe language. Surely the claim that the Khoekhoe are some sort of Übermenschen must be less palatable than the idea that the Enlightenment was enlightening?

One of the author's main themes is that the history of religion, at least in this study, can only be understood within "the wider material context of ethnic conflict and bitter struggles over land and labour." While this is commendable, the author then believes that this "reintegrates the history of religion into the mainstream historical narrative". This is a logical fallacy, for in fact it does the converse, and integrates the mainstream historical narrative into the history of religion. In order to show that the history of religion is relevant to the mainstream, the author must show instead that ethnic conflict and bitter struggles over land and labour, or other processes studied in the mainstream, can only be understood in the context of religious ideas, religious activities, and religious developments. The general reader interested in how the world got to be the way it is, in the histories of indigenous peoples, or with a love of South Africa, its peoples, and its history, needs just such converse demonstrations in order to find the history of religion of more than proprietary interest.

The balance of the author's narrative favours the idea that, post-Enlightenment as her study period is, it is not- at least for understanding settler actions. Religious ideas appear to have been key chiefly amongst the indigenous peoples, and this is best exemplified in the climactic events of the Khoekhoe rebellion. These events are more relevant to the author's thesis, and more interesting, than much of the earlier detail, although less time is spent on them.

There are some features of the book that should irk the specialist as well. The few numbers of any kind that the author happens to mention are not collected into tables or graphs, but just pop up haphazardly. The only quantity the author sees fit to report consistently and numerically is the span of time between the events described and the birth of the Saviour. Do we ever learn how many Khoekhoe we are actually talking about? As with any other quantity of real interest, it is nearly impossible to tell: just blink and you might miss it, as various reckonings flash by on pages 262, 273, and in note 39 on page 396. 'Population' does not even occur in the index. All this detracts from the book's usefulness as a reference. So too do the lack of a detailed table of contents, a timeline of major events, specific cross-references, an index of authors cited, and the fact that both discursive footnotes and citations are piled together in a heap at the end.

This book is at its best when it describes the facts of the matter and relies on the author's intelligence and background knowledge to illuminate them. But the author should forget the metaphorical obfuscations that pass for theory in Artsworld, and dip her toe into the scientific tradition. If we wish to understand the interaction between spiritual thought and material circumstance, then we must grapple with the richness of the material world, no less than with that of the imagination.