Growth of missionary activity
From the end of the 18th century, European missionaries were crucial in the transformation of African society at the Cape. With Christianity came Victorian notions of civilization and progress. Progress meant that Africans produced agricultural products for export and entered into the labour market. The first converts in the Cape were the Khoisan, in the east and north, and the Griqua, who by the 1820s had formed a series of independent if schismatic states in the Vaal-Orange confluence. By the late 1820s these states were seen by the missionaries as destined to have a vast “civilizing” influence in the interior. The neighbouring Sotho-Tswana communities were also early sites of missionary activity. Two of the most famous 19th-century Scottish missionaries to Southern Africa, Robert Moffat and David Livingstone, worked among the Tswana. The most notable of the Tswana converts were the Ngwato, under the king Khama III (reigned 1875–1923), who established a virtual theocracy among his people and was perhaps the most acclaimed Christian convert of his day, while in the eastern Cape the Mfengu were in the forefront of mission activity and peasant enterprise. In the second half of the 19th century, increasing numbers of Xhosa also turned to Christianity. In Zululand and on the Highveld the missionaries both preceded and paved the way for white settlers and were sometimes their fiercest critics.
Initially Christianity tended to advance most rapidly among the disaffected and dispossessed, and especially among women, with those who depended on the slave trade less enthusiastic. It was usually only after a major disaster undermined their belief systems that considerable numbers of men turned to the new religion. By inculcating individualism and encouraging the stratification that was to lead so many of their converts onto the colonial labour markets, the missionaries attacked much that was central to African society and developed an ideology to accompany colonial subordination.
The first European missionaries to south-central Africa, inspired by Livingstone, set up their Universities Mission in 1861. Although this mission ended in tragedy and failure, after Livingstone’s death in 1873 other missionaries followed. In 1875 the Free Church of Scotland established the Livingstonia Mission in his memory, while the established Church of Scotland began work among the Yao at Blantyre the following year. From Lake Nyasa the Scottish missions spread inland to northeastern Zambia and were followed by a large number of representatives of other Christian denominations in the last decades of the century. By the last quarter of the 19th century, European missionaries and African evangelists of almost every denomination were working among the peoples of Southern Africa, eroding chiefly authority and inculcating the new values and practices of the colonial world but also bringing new modes of resistance and educating many Christian Africans who later became outspoken critics of colonialism.