Burghers on the remote frontier were prepared to travel far to have their children baptised and confi rmed. Here they are gathering at Colesberg for the nachtmaal (communion), as depicted in Andrew Smith’s journal.
During the first century of the settlement the burghers did not initially appear to be particularly religious or close to the church. After touring the colony the Dutch official G. W. van Imhoff wrote in 1743 that ‘indifference and ignorance in the frontier districts is such that it has the appearance more of an assembly of blind heathen than a colony of European Christians’.
Much of this appearance was due to neglect by the Company, which established the first congregation at the Cape immediately after founding the settlement, but waited more than 30 years to form the next congregations at Stellenbosch in 1686 and Drakenstein, later called Paarl, in 1691. Some 50 years later, and only after Van Imhoff’s report, two more were established, Roodezand (now Tulbagh) in 1743 and Swartland (now Malmesbury) in 1745. Another 50 years passed before two more were added: Graaff-Reinet in 1792 and Swellendam in 1798.
From the 1790s something of a religious awakening swept over the colony, and the proportion of confirmed members of the church in the burgher population rose steadily. In the 1830s one traveller stated: ‘There are certainly no people in the world who are so truly God-fearing as the Afrikaner.’ Another described the burghers as ‘a serious and religious people . . . with strong sentiments of genuine piety . . . [They] are consistent
members of the Christian church.’ Burghers on the remote frontier were prepared to travel as far as 800 kilometres to have their children baptised and confirmed at Roode-zand. Parents tended to make consent for marriage contingent on both partners being confirmed. Confirmation came to be seen as the threshold that had to be passed for full incorporation into burgher society.
Farmers tended to leave education in the hands of an itinerant teacher, or knecht, shown here smoking his pipe.
A general missionary fervour was lacking on the part of either the Company or the burghers. There was no independent religious order that was committed to missionary work, such as the Jesuits, who spearheaded the expansion of Catholicism in the colonial world. As paid Company servants, the few ministers in the colony had neither the resources nor the inclination to extend their task beyond attending to the spiritual needs of the burghers and others of European descent. They saw no material gain in converting slaves or the Khoisan, and conversion happened only for those who worked for a pious employer.
Acting at the behest of the Rev. Michiel Christiaan Vos, a Cape-born minister, and Dr Johannes van der Kemp, a Dutch-born missionary, the colonists in 1799 founded the first local missionary society, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Zending Genootschap. In Cape Town and across the western part of the colony, the society erected chapels, called gestichten, where coloured Christians worshipped. Foreign missionary societies also took an active interest in the Cape.
At the Cape, slaveholding and Christianity became closely associated with each other. But it was also Christian churches and associations in Britain that from the 1780s led the struggle against slavery. In 1824 the Chief Justice, Johannes Andreas Truter, drew attention to this in an address to the South African Missionary Society, which local colonists founded in 1799. He also told his audience that the Cape church had to play an important role in smoothing the transition to a new labour system. The task of all Christian associations was to work towards a future order in which the ex-slave would serve the master ‘out of love for his duty’, while the master treated the slave with Christian tolerance ‘as someone of the same nature as himself’.
Despite the devotion to the Word, the colonists were remarkably lax about education for their children. In 1812 the judges of the Circuit Court remarked on the ‘miserable state of instruction and civilisation of the youth, which we have met almost everywhere’. Pupils did not acquire much more than basic literacy and knowledge of the bare essentials of the Calvinist doctrine. Many did not attend schools at all. In 1812 the judges found that children of many affluent families could not write or read. Early in the nineteenth century, only 100 out of 3 000 white children in the district Graaff-Reinet received formal education.
In the few other kerkplekke, or ‘church towns’, the koster (verger) usually doubled as teacher, imparting a smattering of education. Farmers tended to leave the task to a lowly itinerant teacher, or knecht. In 1804 John Barrow wrote: ‘At one place that we passed the poor schoolmaster was drawing the plough, while a [Khoikhoi] had the more honourable post of holding and directing it.’ But even in Cape Town the colonists’ demand for education was weak. In 1809 there were six Dutch schools with a total of 515 pupils against two slave schools with a total of 1 162 pupils.
