British influence on what was to become the British Empire and French influence on French speaking Africa have been extensively explored so far, but few books focus on French missions in Britain’s sphere of influence. The French missionary Eugène Casalis represents a perhaps unique experience of a man taking part in the nation-building process in an African country, Lesotho, which belonged to London’s ‘reserve’. Casalis was to become the King’s special advisor and is still hailed today as one of the few men who built the country. Based on the research of a dozen African and European academics who convened in Morija in 2012 to commemorate the bicentenary of that great Protestant humanist and to analyse “Missionary Work in Africa in Eugene Casalis’s Time and Beyond”, this book will provide fresh and stimulating material for readers interested in colonial and post-colonial studies, missions and religion, and cultural and historical exchanges between the Southern part of the African continent and Great Britain.

This book provides a social interpretation of written South African translation history from the seventeenth century to the present, considering how trends involving various languages have reflected ideologies and unequal power relations and focusing attention on translation’s often hidden social operation. Translation is investigated in relation to colonial mercantilism, scientific knowledge of extraction, Christian missionary conversion, Islamic education, various nationalisms, apartheid oppression and the anti-apartheid struggle, neoliberalism, exclusion and post-apartheid social transformation by employing Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. This book will be an essential resource for scholars, graduate students, and general readers who are interested in or work on the history and practice of translation and its cultural agents in the South African context.

'This is a South African story of an unsung hero, a man forgotten by history – though not by me, nor by the people who knew and respected him ...' When his grandfather gave sermons, he was 'capable of shaking mountains', a church leader tells journalist and author Lesley Mofokeng. 'Ntate Mofokeng pulled people towards God with the great and rare talent of a motivator.' In this revealing book, Mofokeng investigates the life of his grandfather, Mongangane Wilfred Mofokeng, a prominent Dutch Reformed Church evangelist. In the 1950s, as Black South Africans were being evicted from the cities to live in reserves and homelands, Mongangane set out to build a community at a dusty cattle post in the far North West province. There he managed to establish a resilient community that mostly lived outside the repressions of the apartheid regime. The journey takes the author from Johannesburg's Marabi-soaked townships of the 1930s to his childhood home of Gelukspan near Lichtenburg and then to rural Free State and the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. In what becomes a spiritual quest, he traces the inspirational footsteps of his ancestors and the legendary King Moshoeshoe. Mofokeng also explores the politics and history of the Dutch Reformed Church's Black constituency and uncovers why to this day it is called Kereke ya Fora – or 'Church of the French' – and its hymns are sung across denominations and in social spaces outside the church.

The explosive expansion of Christianity in Africa and Asia during the last two centuries constitutes one of the most remarkable cultural transformations in the history of mankind. Because it coincided with the spread of European economic and political hegemony, it tends to be taken for granted that Christian missions went hand in hand with imperialism and colonial conquest. In this book historians survey the relationship between Christian missions and the British Empire from the seventeenth century to the 1960s and treat the subject thematically, rather than regionally or chronologically. Many of these themes are treated at length for the first time, relating the work of missions to language, medicine, anthropology, and decolonization. Other important chapters focus on the difficult relationship between missionaries and white settlers, women and mission, and the neglected role of the indigenous evangelists who did far more than European or North American missionaries to spread the Christian religion - belying the image of Christianity as the 'white man's religion'.

The collected essays in Migration and Cultural Contact: Germany and Australia investigate historical documents, letters, film, literature and other cultural sources to reveal how each country influenced the culture, intellectual thought and aesthetics of the other from earliest colonial times through to today.

This is the only book that addresses the relations between religion, Protestant missions, and empire building, linking together all three fields of study by taking as its starting point the early eighteenth century Anglican initiatives in colonial North America and the Caribbean. It considers how the early societies of the 1790s built on this inheritance, and extended their own interests to the Pacific, India, the Far East, and Africa. Fluctuations in the vigor and commitment of the missions, changing missionary theologies, and the emergence of alternative missionary strategies, are all examined for their impact on imperial expansion. Other themes include the international character of the missionary movement, Christianity's encounter with Islam, and major figures such as David Livingstone, the state and politics, and humanitarianism, all of which are viewed in a fresh light.

The initial religious encounters between settlers in southern Africa and the indigenous inhabitants entailed the establishment of settler churches and the relationships with their home countries. However, this era saw little by way of the spread of Christianity. In 1799, with the arrival of Johannes van der Kemp and other missionaries from the London Missionary Society, Christianity began to cross colonial boundaries, marking the great era of missions in southern Africa. At the outset, the missionary presence remained precariously perched between success and failure. While missionary influence among the indigenous peoples was relatively insignificant, the opposite was true within the colony. At the same time, expansion pressures from the Cape precipitated growing conflict between settlers and indigenous peoples. Increasingly, missionaries were caught between the interests of indigenous peoples and those of the colony. For the most part, they sided with their colonial heritage and roots, but in some significant instances, their identification with indigenous people led them to take extremely unpopular stands against both Boer and British colonial authority. Such conflicts are traced at various levels throughout this book. The broader spread of Christianity during this period is also examined through multiple voices and stories.

Dynamic language practices of African multilingual speakers have not been cogently described in a book-length manuscript. This book challenges assumptions that led to South Africa's 11 official languages and makes a case for mutual inter-comprehensibility. Students, teachers, and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, translanguaging, and teacher education will find this book thought-provoking.

The workers who migrate from Lesotho to the mines and cities of neighboring South Africa have developed a rich genre of sung oral poetry—word music—that focuses on the experiences of migrant life. This music provides a culturally reflexive and consciously artistic account of what it is to be a migrant or part of a migrant's life. It reveals the relationship between these Basotho workers and the local and South African powers that be, the "cannibals" who live off of the workers' labor. David Coplan presents a moving collection of material that for the first time reveals the expressive genius of these tenacious but disenfranchised people. Coplan discusses every aspect of the Basotho musical literature, taking into account historical conditions, political dynamics, and social forces as well as the styles, artistry, and occasions of performance. He engages the postmodern challenge to decolonize our representation of the ethnographic subject and demonstrates how performance formulates local knowledge and communicates its shared understandings. Complete with transcriptions of full male and female performances, this book develops a theoretical and methodological framework crucial to anyone seeking to understand the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of performance. This work is an important contribution to South African studies, to ethnomusicology and anthropology, and to performance studies in general.