Genadendal is blessed with a rich tangible and intangible heritage. It boasts of vernacular architecture, musical traditions and language and a long tradition of humanitarian efforts and political struggle. It is with pleasure that we learned about the completion of the restoration project due to the assistance of the Dutch Government. The improvements that were effected provided the inhabitants with infrastructure to improve the quality of their lives.

The Attempted Erasure of the Khoekhoe and San delves into the complex issue of problematic coloured identity and the ongoing erasure of the Khoekhoe and San people in South Africa. Despite the end of apartheid, this erasure continues to persist today, starting as far back as 1652. There were two types of erasure that took place - genocide and bureaucratic. While the former is acknowledged by President Thabo Mbeki in his “I Am an African” speech, the latter began in 1828 with Ordinance 50 in the Cape Colony. From this point, the Khoekhoe and San were bureaucratically erased, culminating in the 1950 Population Registration Act. Despite these attempts, the Khoekhoe and San people resisted and fought for their identity, resulting in their continued existence in the present day. This book documents their painful journey, highlighting their struggles against subjugation and erasure since 1652.

Professor Hastings also compares the relation of Christian history to the comparable development of Islam in Africa.

This is the first full-length historical study of indigenous evangelists across a range of societies, geographical regions and colonial regimes and the first to focus on the complex issues of authority surrounding the evangelists. It answers a need frequently voiced in recent studies of Christian missions. Most scholars now acknowledge that the remarkable expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia and the Pacific in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed far more to the efforts of indigenous preachers than to the foreign missionaries who loom so large in publications. This book addresses that concern making an excellent introduction to the role of indigenous evangelists in the spread of Christianity, and the many countervailing pressures with which these individuals had to contend. It also includes in the introductory discussions useful statements of the current state of scholarship and theoretical debates in this field.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century through to 1960, Protestant missionaries were the most important intermediaries between South Africa’s ruling white minority and its black majority. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in shaping that nation’s history. The missionaries articulated a universalist and egalitarian ideology derived from New Testament teachings that rebuked the racial hierarchies endemic to South African society. Yet white settlers, the churches closely tied to them, and even many missionaries evaded or subverted these ideas. In the early years of settlement, the white minority justified its supremacy by equating Christianity with white racial identity. Later, they adopted segregated churches for blacks and whites, followed by segregationist laws blocking blacks’ access to prosperity and citizenship—and, eventually, by the ambitious plan of social engineering that was apartheid. Providing historical context reaching back to 1652, Elphick concentrates on the era of industrialization, segregation, and the beginnings of apartheid in the first half of the twentieth century. The most ambitious work yet from this renowned historian, Elphick’s book reveals the deep religious roots of racial ideas and initiatives that have so profoundly shaped the history of South Africa.

While setting up a refreshment station in the Cape of Good Hope, Jan van Riebeeck tried his hand at making wine and brewing beer. This introduction, partnered with its trusty bedfellow, sex, set the tone for what would become a hedonistic metropolis. Wine, Women and Good Hope is a romp through this more salacious history of the Cape, looking at the antics of certain missionaries from the London Missionary Society, whose wandering eyes and love of the flesh took precedence over their moral duty to the church, and Cecil John Rhodes, whose excessive indulgence in alcohol contributed to his own demise and no doubt influenced the disgraceful behaviour of some of his contemporaries. Using her knowledge as a genealogist, June McKinnon traces the lineages of many well-known family trees to overturn the notion that those who lived in the past were nobler or had more sense than their modern descendants. Encompassing tales that are both humorous and tragic in their revelations of past misdeeds, this book will give you access to the little-known history of the Cape of Good Hope, and leave you asking the question, ‘What were my ancestors really up to?’