Christian missions: Our cross to bear

Christmas time, for me as a child, was the overpowering waft of spicy, woody incense at morning Mass.

It began with the spirited, giggle-peppered singing of youths dressed in uncomfortable “Christmas clothes” marching up a hill to St Cuthberts Mission cathedral. Shiny brown Vaselined faces popped out of bright red robes tailing a procession of clergymen and servers. Thick smoke was thrust into obedient lungs, belting out a sombre hymn as if to mark the seriousness with which black South Africans embraced their colonial, Christian heritage. Entering the over a 100-year-old building always prompted me to imagine entering the very gates of heaven or the set to a good metal music video.

My grandmother’s face was among those raised to the heavens in prayer and worship. The clergymen and uniformed church members, a cornucopia of red, purple, gold and white, would sway in unison with the sea of black suits and new dresses.

Even then I knew how important it was in our culture to mark everything we did as a unit with a verse from the Bible, a hymn and prayer. Christmas was a microcosm of how we were supposed to live our lives. Across SA, millions grew up like me, with a family raised and fed by a mission church and an understanding of its place in our identity.

Christian missions have a rocky romance with the emancipation of the black South African mind. On one hand, places like the Eastern Cape became known long before the birth of apartheid as incubation hubs for educated black men and women who became freedom fighters. On the other hand, postcolonial theorists point out that if ever there was a tool to stamp out the last bit of self Africans could hold onto, it was Christian indoctrination. It was there Africans learned that evil had to be cleansed off one’s soul with the blood of Christ and not the blood of a sacrificial animal. It was where black people learned to be ashamed.

But mission school education and the protection missions offered from the harsh reality of the colonised African became the springboard for a renaissance of African awakeness, birthing prolific thinkers and writers. In times of war, missions often survived because of the respect from the black communities they were there to control.

“Missionaries were the counsellors of the chiefs under whom they dwelt and laboured. In many cases indeed, the missionary was the uncrowned king of the community,” wrote historian professor Johan du Plessis.

The education at these schools was often far superior to what came to be known as Bantu Education. They prompted those they educated to grow up expecting to be exceptional.

I reflect on the sheer might of the walls of St Cuthberts Mission, bridging the two villages of Qudu and Nkwanca in Tsolo in the Eastern Cape, and the future judges, advocates, ambassadors, millionaires and philanthropists who answered the call of the same mission bells and tread the same path to join that congregation on the hill.

Relics of the era of our oppression they may be, but it amazes me that these walls still stand and the same chorus still resonates every Sunday as it has for many lifetimes, ushering in a new generation, whoever they may become.

Simnikiwe Hlatshaneni.

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