The first comprehensive study of the interaction between the European missionaries and Africans in precolonial Namibia focusses on the expansion of the colonial frontier. Africans entered a new world of social relations where they faced the transformation of their societies in an ambivalent manner. Irrespective of the final, and unpredictable, outcome of the contest for power, many Africans encountered new challenges with initiative and determination. (Franz Steiner 1997)

The title of this book originates from the self-description of Namibian Evangelists in their own words. African evangelists of the Rhenish Mission Society (RMS) played a crucial but mostly overlooked role in shaping the spiritual and social networks that transformed indigenous communities from the early nineteenth century. The author draws from a wide range of German, Namibian and South African archival sources that have been supplemented with a large number of interviews, to explore the history of the indigenous evangelists of the RMS. African supporters were often the first heralds of the new religion at remote villages and cattle posts before the white strangers made an appearance. The Namibian evangelists’ familiarity with the traditional culture and the local vernacular endowed them with a credibility that many of the European newcomers found difficult to acquire. By interweaving mission and church history between 1820 and 1990 with a biographical approach, the author brings a hidden chapter in Namibian history to life.

The Gordonia region of the Northern Cape province has received relatively little attention from historians. In Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land dispossession and resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990, Martin Legassick explores aspects of the generally unknown ‘brown’ and ‘black’ history of the region. Emphasising the lives of ordinary people, his writing is also in part an exercise in ‘applied history’ – historical writing with a direct application to people’s lives in the present. Tracing the indigenous history of Gordonia as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the book presents accounts of family histories, episodes of indigenous resistance to colonisation, and studies of the ultimate imposition of racial segregation and land dispossession on the inhabitants of the region. A recurrent theme is the question of identity and how the extreme ethnic fluidity and social mixing apparent in earlier times crystallised in the colonial period into racial identities, until with final conquest came imposed racial classification.