The Role of the Missionaries in conquest - Introduction

From the book: The Role of the Missionaries in conquest by Nosipho Majeke

FOR A PEOPLE engaged in a liberatory struggle it is necessary to rewrite the history of the past. It is part of the very process of liberation to expose the distortions of history which are presented by the herronvolk as truth and taught to the young in schools and universities. It can be readily understood why the herrenvolk should distort history and present a false picture of what actually happened. Having carried out the first stage of conquest, the military conquest of the peoples of Southern Africa, the *baThwa, the +Khoikhoin and the Bantu, and confiscated their land, they had next to ensure heir continued domination over the people, reducing them to a position of political and economic enslavement.

Now if a ruling minority can enslave the mind of the people, control their ideas and their whole way of thinking, they have found an even more efficient weapon for subjugating them than the use of force, the military and the police. For then the people themselves assist in their own enslavement. If the rulers can make the people believe that they are inferior, wipe out their past history or present: in such a way that they feel, not pride but shame, then they create the conditions that make it easy to dominate the people.

But once we understand the insidious effect of this process, then the whole fabric of falsification begins to topple and crumble. For it has many ramifications; the Great Lie permeates not only history, but also literature, religion and science itself. These have been prostituted in order to bolster up the position of the herrenvolk. In a word, the Great Lie permeates the whole of society. But once let us take the initial step by asking how the situation in which we and ourselves has come about, prick the bubble of all the racial myths find White superiority and Black inferiority and strip away layer after layer of the Great Lie, we are on the way to liberating ourselves.

It is in this light that we must totally reject the herrenvolk distortions and falsifications of history. The story, if truly told, is one f continuous plunder of land and cattle by the European invaders, the devastation and decimation of people, followed by their economic enslavement. It is a story of treacherous deeds, rapacity seasoned with sanctimonious hypocrisy, of treaties that were not treaties but the cynical legalising of plunder, of the policy of and rule' carried out with systematic cunning in order to turn one tribe against another, one people against another.

When the Non-Europeans shall write the full history of the past they will have to find other names for the so-called Great Trek and the “Kaffir” Wars, for the “liberation of the Hottentots” a Rescue of the Fingoes from conditions from slavery Rev. Ayliff, the Wesleyn from conditions of "Rescue of the Fingoes from conditions of abject slavery, Rev. Ayliff, the Wesleyan missionary, once described the capitulation of fifteen thousand "Fingos" to the English Governor which he himself had engineered. We shall find more precise designations for such terms as the "Act of Union," the "Representations of Natives" Act and for "Christian Trusteeship." We shall need a new vocabulary, for language itself has become distorted in the service of herrenvolkism. The very word "Non-European" is an absurdity when a man must needs describe himself as the negative of another man. Our future historians, too, will strip the tinsel and velvet from those puppets who strut the stage of history from van Riebeeck onwards, the reverends and governors, soldiers and politicians the heroes of herrenvolkism. What manner of history is it that presents Tshaka, a military genius of his time, as a monster, or Hintsa, a man of pride and dignity, as a "treacherous and ungrateful savage" ? What kind of British "protection" was it that robbed Ngqika and his son, Maqoma, of the land of their fathers that rent the kingdom of Moshoeshoe with fratricidal strife and deprived a whole people of their land?

These are but some of the distortions and falsifications which will be the task of our future historians to remove. The sum total of the Great Lie has been to bolster up the herrenvolk and make the Non-European himself believe in his own inferiority. Daily the schools and universities the young have been indoctrinated with pernicious racial myths. Now we have to ask ourselves why herrenvolk, calling in the assistance of its handmaiden, the Church have always controlled education, curbed freedom of speech censored the written word, burned books and sometimes imprisonment for daring to read them. They must have a mighty fear of the power of ideas and the growth of ideas that will stir the enslaved mind to see its own condition and question how it came pass.

Anything that contributes to such self-knowledge is of value to him.

It is part of the liberating process itself.

With us, that process of liberation has already started. We begin to know ourselves. That is why we undertake the task of being re-writing history.

Once more:

"we fight ideas with ideas.”