Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2

Of Revelation and Revolution is at once a highly imaginative, richly detailed history of colonialism, Christianity, and consciousness in South Africa, and a theoretically challenging consideration of the most difficult questions posed by the nature of social experience. Although primarily concerned with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Of Revelation and Revolution also looks forward to the age of apartheid and beyond. Of Revelation and Revolution is a study of the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization in South Africa. It traces the processes by which Non-conformist Christian missionaries, among the earliest foot soldiers of British colonialism, sought to change the hearts and minds, the signs and practices, of the Southern Tswana. As such, it is a historical anthropology of cultural confrontation--of domination and reaction, struggle and innovation. Its chronological span is approximately a century, between 1820 and 1920, although it is not written according to the strict demands of chronology. But it also casts its eye forward to the present, toward both everyday resistance and historical consciousness in apartheid South Africa. Similarly, while it focuses on a particular people--those made, in the nineteenth century, into an ethnic group called "the" Tswana--its compass extends to the predicament of black South Africans at large.