made on the spot by Rev. R. Moffat
Mission House, Blomfield Street, London, 23 January 1843
Less than a week after a ‘Special Meeting’ at Exeter Hall resolved to work towards the suppression of the British opium trade with China (Chapter 16), the Directors of the London Missionary Society gathered once again.1 At the east end of their board room table sat the Chairman, flanked on his left by the Home Secretary, with two Foreign Secretaries on his right.2
The Directors of the London Missionary Society had assembled for a Valedictory farewell service for Robert Moffat and his family, including John Mokotedi Serian, ‘a native of Africa’ who had accompanied them to Britain ‘in the capacity of a servant’.3 They were joined by three male missionary recruits, on their way to Africa, as well as Miss Hone, going as a teacher for the Ladies’ Educational Society.4
Parallels with the departure of John Williams on the Camden, just under five years earlier, were clear.5 Moffat had been ordained alongside Williams back in 1816, and had recently returned to Britain when news of Williams’ martyrdom arrived in early 1840 (Chapter 15). In high demand as a speaker, in June 1842 Moffat published his book, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa, closely following the model established by John Williams’ (1833) Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands. The illustrations were even produced by George Baxter.
During the service, Rev. Thomas Binney told Moffat :
We feel deeply the circumstance of similarity between you and the late lamented “Martyr of Erromanga;” you and Williams sat together at your ordination; and I suppose you were together when you took leave of the brethren. Very similar were your labours, duties, and achievements, among a people in somewhat similar circumstances. Both returned to England — both went in and out among the churches — both had every where an honourable welcome — both greatly interested the world as well as the church — and both gave us a record and image of themselves in a printed book — and now you are departing as he departed — may God grant that here the parallel may end; that you may be taken to the land of your adoption; that you may there live for many years in labour yet more abundant, and with results still more remarkable!6
The Lamented Missionary, the Revd. John Williams, at his writing desk
Colour print in oils by George Baxter, 1843
Robert Moffat, with a Tswana parliament (pitsho) in the background
Colour print in oils by George Baxter, 1843
Weeks later, George Baxter announced the sale of a pair of coloured oil portraits for 10s. 6d. each, one showing Moffat with a ‘Bechuana parliament”, the other showing Williams ‘seated in his Study composing his celebrated Missionary Enterprises, which have been designated as a Supplement to the Acts of the Apostles’. Baxter even created a logo for the prints, showing two sides of a globe and the areas of the world in which each missionary worked.
Rev. John Campbell had compiled The Missionary’s Farewell to document the events of Williams’ departure in 1838, and also published The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat in 1843.7 While the former included a black and white engraving of the Camden, the latter featured a signed portrait of Moffat, perhaps indicating an increasing salience of missionary portraits (and signatures). Missionaries like Moffat were on their way to becoming celebrated heroes, presumably partly a consequence of the high profile death of John Williams.
At the beginning of Campbell’s account of the meeting, he provided a description of the Mission House, ‘That our distant, and especially our juvenile readers may more fully enter into the spirit of a valedictory service at the Board of the London Missionary Society’. Entering the hallway from Blomfield Street, a ‘double glass door’ at its far end ‘admits you to the Missionary Museum, an awful yet glorious place!’. Campbell told his readers:
There is not such another, connected with Protestant missions, in England, in Europe, or in the world. The numerous idols and articles of heathenism which you behold, were supplied chiefly by the missionaries of the London Missionary Society; a few other interesting objects are donations from benevolent travellers, or friendly officers of mercantile vessels.8
He then described cases A-C, holding ‘upwards of three hundred gods and objects of superstitious regard, from the islands in the Pacific Ocean’, before turning to the ‘gigantic idol… brought from Rarotonga, by Mr Williams’ nearby, although this was outside the case. Campbell lingered on the arrow fired into the boat of the Camden, ‘brought from Erromanga by a sailor who witnessed the murder of the devoted and honoured missionary!’9
Case D was said to contain ’considerably upwards of two hundred idols and articles from China and Ultra-Ganges’, but the description focused on ’six etchings, by a Chinese artist named Sunqua, which tell a sad tale concerning the results of the cupidity of some of our wicked countrymen — the PROGRESS OF THE OPIUM SMOKER’ (Chapter 16).10
Case F displayed idols and objects of superstition from India, including the three Presidencies’, dwelling on ‘Kalee, the black goddess of cruelty’ alongside her consort ‘Shiva, the destroyer’, noting that the history of this god could be taken as ‘a chronicle of the basest, foulest deeds of which fallen humanity can form a conception’.11
Compared to such lurid descriptions, the paragraph describing case G, showing ‘articles of dress, domestic utensils, arms, and other curiosities from Africa and Madagascar’, is rather mild. Items described included a medicinal stick and ivory armlets ‘given by the queen of Lattakoo [Dithakong] to the late John Campbell’, as well as ‘neck, arm, and leg rings, used by the Mantatee females’ and ‘presented by Mr Moffat’ (Chapter 8).12
Advertising logo created by George Baxter for the pair of portraits above.
From and advertisement in the back pages of the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, June 1843.
Portrait of Robert Moffat, with signature
Printed opposite the title page of John Campbell’s The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat in Edinburgh, Manchester and London, 1843.
Finally, the text described a series of Natural History specimens including a boa constrictor killed at Kristnapore near Calcutta which had featured on the Missionary Chronicle for July 1836 (Chapter 14), the giraffe ‘shot in Griqua country… by Mr Campbell’s party, July 31, 1814’ (Chapter 3), as well as:
Two large crocodiles… killed in the Lempopo [Limpopo] river, in the interior of South Africa, and presented by Mr. Moffat. But I must desist, and refer you to the catalogue, which you may have of the messenger, and which will explain every article in the museum.13
Missionary Museum - A Perspective View of the Principal Room
printed in the Illustrated London News, 20 Ma 1843, p. 342
Scanned from the author’s personal collection.
Sadly, no catalogues from this date survive, but an image of the museum was published in the Illustrated London News a few months later, on 20 May 1843, to illustrate an article describing the Society’s Annual Meeting. Readers were told:
The museum of this admirable society has latterly become an indispensable appendage to the great anniversary meeting. It is very rich in the natural history of the Polynesian Islands; and its Tahitian collection, rivals, in extent and usefulness, the collections of Captain Cook at The British Museum. Thither, after their meetings, the friends of mission are wont to repair, to revive their sympathies by an actual inspection of those idol gods which it is the first aim of the society “utterly to abolish”.14
The image, described as ‘a perspective view of the principal room’, has the giraffe as its focus (Chapter 3), rivalled in height by the ancestral pole from Rarotonga (Chapter 12). One of the crocodiles can also be made out lurking below a number of missionary portraits, next to what appears to be a globe. In front of the giraffe, a small glass case on a stand encloses a miniature thatched house.
The description which provides this chapter’s title comes from a later catalogue, printed around 1860. It appears to be an updated version of a much shorter listing, ‘MODEL of a HOUSE at Lattakoo’, which appeared in the 1826 catalogue. It seems likely that this model was sent to the museum in late 1823, along with items associated with the battle of Dithakong (discussed in Chapter 8).
Bizarrely, an image described as a ‘New Zealand Hunt and Fence of Garden’ appeared in The New Zealanders, published in 1830, alongside images of a number of a number of other items from the Missionary Museum.15 In April 1839, following the relocation of the museum in 1835, the collector and curator Henry Syer Cuming wrote to the Directors about ‘the miserable state of the Missionary Museum… not only of utter confusion and Chaos, but in a state of ruin and decay’. He suggested items in the collection were:
fast going to decay, the damp walls have generated mould… the Moth had committed its ravages… leaving hairless skins to mask its progress… the spider has spun its web in every corner, and the extraordinary works both of God and Man are alike obscured, and disfigured with dust and cobwebs.16
He demanded, ‘Is it so much to ask, that those Idols to which the Heathen once paid divine honours, be preserved in England as a monument of the glorious triumphs of the Cross, achieved by the Christian armies of our Country’. Cuming volunteered his services towards ‘identifying localities’, presumably necessary if a South African house could be mistaken for one from New Zealand.17
It is unclear whether Cuming’s offer to undertake the ‘Augean task of arranging the Missionary Museum’ was taken up, but it seems to have at least prompted some action. Someone directed to the museum by the former LMS missionary Lancelot Threlkeld in Australia (Chapter 10), who was pleased to find Threlkeld’s portrait still on display, published an account of a visit to the museum soon afterwards, in January 1840. He suggested that ‘although the arrangement of the numerous specimens is at present very imperfect, and no catalogue has been published, we obtained every necessary information from the labels affixed to the different articles, and from the intelligence and attention of the curator’, quite possibly Cuming himself.18
Cuming’s engagement with the museum is suggestive of the growing interest in what, to use a newly coined term, was called ‘Ethnology’. The Ethnological Society of London was established in February 1843 as a distinct, more scientifically oriented, group by members of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. In the same year, the Quaker physician, James Cowles Prichard, published his Natural History of Man (which included a named portrait of Jan Tzatzoe in his military jacket, see Chapter 15). This reached a conclusion that humans were all essentially of one type, despite external physical differences.19
When the description of the museum featured in the account of Moffat’s Valedictory service in 1843, a catalogue was once again available. This suggests the description of the model house may actually have been updated while Moffat was in Britain, between June 1839 and January 1843.
As a young and relatively unknown missionary, Moffat had remained unnamed in the 1826 catalogue. By the 1860 edition, however, he was recorded as the donor of nineteen items. Some were likely donated in 1839, but others were already at the museum by 1826.
As well as the addition of Moffat’s name to multiple catalogue descriptions, another notable change was the inclusion of a number of Setswana words in later catalogue descriptions (just as Australian words were used for a small number of items in the 1826 catalogue – see chapter 10). These included:
-
Litlaka, or sandals made of hide, four pairs, worn by the Bechuana tribe.
-
Makantsa, a Bechuana sash, suspended on the hip, in their dances.
-
Manyena. Ear-drops of brass wire. Bechuana.
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Mihitsana. Finger-rings, of ditto.[Brass wire] From ditto.[Bechuana]
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Matlatla. Bechuana earplates of copper, worn only by persons of distinction.- Presented by the Rev. R. Moffat
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Likhau, large angular plates of copper, worn across the breast by Mantatee warriors.
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Litola, or sticks, for producing fire by friction. Bechuana.
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Limao, or needles and cases, used by the Bechuanas, Barolongs, and Mantatees.
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Lekuka, a vessel of ox-hide for preparing milk.20
Part of Moffat’s reason for returning to Britain was to oversee the printing of a Setswana translation of the New Testament. Working on this presumably improved his linguistic abilities, but it is also the case that John Mokotedi Serian, who accompanied Moffat, could easily have supplied these words. Mokotedi’s visit to Britain provides an important glimpse into the increasingly limited roles African Christians were allowed to play within the emerging church.
Jan Tzatzoe
Printed in The Natural History of Man by James Cowles Prichard, 1843. Engraved by J Bull, published by Hippolyte Baillière, 1843.
Te Papa (1992-0035-2162). Gift of Miss E March, 1951.
Illustration of the 'Lekuka', together with a description of its use
Printed in Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa by Robert Moffat, 1842.
Image by George Baxter, possibly from an artefact at the Missionary Museum.
As part of his work on African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier, the historian Stephen C. Volz has pieced together the details of Mokotedi’s life. Mokotedi, he tells us, was a child when he took refuge at Moffat’s mission with his mother, Moshane, as part of the group of defeated ‘Mantatees’ (Chapter 8). She was subsequently joined by her husband, Nteledi, a leader of the Bakwena ba Monaheng (a branch of the people of the crocodile), but was not permitted to receive baptism until Nteledi separated from her in 1833 (as his second wife, she was party to a polygamous marriage).21
Although his parents returned South to pursue an allegiance with the powerful emerging leader of the Basotho, Moshoeshoe (also a member of the Bakwena, the people of the crocodile), Mokotedi returned to the mission to complete his education, as well as to receive medical treatment. There, Robert Moffat seems to have established a relationship of patronage with Mokotedi, lending him four cattle.22
This sort of relationship is termed mafisa in Setswana, enabling poorer members of a community to gain access to cattle in return for looking after them, using their milk and keeping some of the offspring. It is, however, a relationship that involves an expectation of loyalty. Mokotedi also seems to have assisted Moffat with the work of translation, as well as working as a typesetter at the mission printing press.
In southern Africa, Mokotedi had been dependent on Moffat. Arriving in Britain, he was celebrated as an African Christian and the given the same treatment as other visitors such as Mary, John and Martha in 1804 (Chapter 2), but also more recently Jan Tzatzoe, Andries Stoffels, and James Read junior (Chapter 15). According to Moffat:
He was taken to platforms & schools to give addresses and to be admired. He was invited to jaunts, picnics & evening parties. He was taken by the arm & led into dazzling drawing rooms, became the toy of the young ladies; & some old ones too, he was politely asked the favour of locks from his hair & mementoes from his pen.23
At a Juvenile Missionary Meeting at Exeter Hall in March 1840, Moffat introduced Mokotedi, telling the assembled children of his rescue from the field of battle with his mother, when ‘bloody battle axes” had been thrown at Moffat’s head. He also introduced Sarah Roby, a young African girl, buried alive as a baby but rescued and adopted by the Moffats. She had been named after the wife of Moffat’s mentor in Manchester, William Roby, and served the Moffats as a maid. In England, she was ‘learning the infant school system, with a view to instructing her countrywomen’.24
When William Wallace Scott painted Moffat in 1842, Mokotedi and Sarah Roby were shown at his feet. Mokotedi’s face appears only inches from a copy of the Setswana New Testament, open in Moffat’s hand. The book, together with Moffat’s face, hands, and white shirt are bright points of light in an otherwise rather gloomy painting, presumably intended to show Moffat a bringing light into Africa’s ‘heathen darkness’.
Mokotedi’s posture, in particular, echoes the beseeching attitude taken by an enslaved African in the famous icon of the slavery abolition movement, who asked ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Such images served to connect the anti-slavery movement with a wave of missionary work in Africa. Less than a year after the final emancipation of slaves across the British Empire, on 1 August 1838, Thomas Fowell Buxton established the Society for the Extinction of Slavery and for the Civilization of Africa, on 1 June 1840 at Exeter Hall. The following year, this sent a major expedition of three Royal Navy steamers up the Niger River in West Africa, with the aim of promoting legitimate commerce alongside Christianity to replace the slave trade.25
This turn to Africa, after the abolition of slavery, also seems to have impacted a young medical missionary initially inspired by Karl Gützlaff’s call for missionaries to China (Chapter 16). Following a series of meetings with Robert Moffat in London, David Livingstone sailed for southern Africa in November 1840. He would become the most enduringly famous British missionary of the nineteenth century, and certainly the only one to be granted a British state funeral after his death in Africa in 1873 (see Chapter 21).
Robert Moffat, with John Mokoteri and Sarah Roby
Oil on canvas painted by William Wallace Scott
Robert Moffat played an important role in shifting missionary attitudes towards Africa and Africans. Unlike Johannes Van Der Kemp and James Read who took African wives, and, according to their critics, even adopted African dress, Moffat carefully cultivated his distance.
When it had been proposed that Robert Moffat replace James Read as head of the LMS mission at Dithakong in 1820, Robert Hamilton, another resident missionary, noted that Kgosi Mothibi pointed out that “all were not alike, that Mr. Read, I and John Hendrick did not beat the children when they came and plagued us.” Moffat had only worked in the region for two years, but his reputation already preceded him.26
Following his appointment, Moffat dismissed a number of African Christians from their formal (and salaried) roles at the mission, including Cupido Kakkerlak, a stalwart of the church at Bethelsdorp who had been Campbell’s ‘travelling director’ in 1813 (Chapter 3). Using influence gained at the Battle of Dithakong, Moffat set about moving the mission to Seoding, closer to Kuruman’s natural spring after he returned from the Cape in 1824.
Moffat seems to have been anxious to escape his own dependence on Kgosi Mothibi. Instead, he began establishing his own clients, such as Mokotedi, and the new location of his mission increasingly became a refuge for displaced people.27 Moffat even seems to have self-consciously asserted a status as Mothibi’s equal, wearing a jacket and waistcoat made from leopard skin, a material normally reserved for Tswana royals.28
In January 1825, Andrew Smith, a military doctor recently appointed Superintendent of the South African Museum in Cape Town, wrote to Moffat asking him to collect for the new museum. He expressed a particular interest in snakes, frogs, as well as ‘an animal near Latakoo somewhat like an armadillo covered with scales’, presumably the pangolin. Smith also sent Moffat arsenical soap along with a set of printed instructions describing how to preserve their skins.29
What Moffat actually sent to Cape Town is unclear, although a knife with an ivory handle carved in the form a zebra at the South African Museum in Cape Town (now Iziko 3306) is associated with an old label with Moffat’s name on it. When Smith led the Expedition for Exploring Central Africa beyond the boundary of the Cape Colony in 1834, it was to mission stations, including Kuruman, that he initially went. In a report, published following his return to Cape Town, Smith wrote:
The importance of the services which were rendered by the various Missionaries we visited, will, ere this, have been apparent; yet, comparatively speaking, but a small proportion of their real utility has been noticed, from the necessity of abstaining, on the present occasion, from particular details. To all of them I consider the Association to be deeply indebted for whatever degree of success has attended the exertions of the expedition and to Mr Moffat especially, for the friendly reception and the kind treatment which we experienced from Umsiligas [Mzilikazi]30.
Moffat’s establishment of a personal fiefdom at Kuruman in the decade before Smith’s arrival had been associated with a significant building programme. While the model house at the Missionary Museum in London represented a typical building at Maruping [New Dithakong or Lattakoo] in the early 1820s, when Smith’s expedition arrived at Kuruman in 1835 they found a row of stone buildings. One member of the expedition even described the mission as ‘the most perfect station’.31
The earliest church on the site, which doubled as a schoolroom, was built by Joseph Arend, who had escaped slavery at the Cape to trade in ivory beyond the frontier, eventually purchasing his freedom with the profits. He was a skilled builder and thatcher, and seems to have been baptised when the building, initially a rectangular 51 by 16 feet, opened in May 1829.32
After two stone houses had been built to house the missionaries, the foundations of a larger chapel, double the size of the original at 100 by 30 feet, were laid out between them. Labour and donations were promised to aid its construction by a number of local supporters – at the time there were over 200 houses in the vicinity of the mission, housing around 800 people, around a quarter of whom regularly attended Sunday services.33
Construction of the new chapel was overseen by Mr Millen, a stonemason who pursued a sideline as an ivory trader. Building work was supported by additional funds raised at the Cape, supplemented with donations sent by Mary Moffat’s brother, a missionary at Madras in India, as well as from Rev. Richard Knill at St. Petersburg in Russia.34 After Millen died on a trading expedition in 1834, the stone walls were completed by David Hume, a trader resident at the mission.35
The other LMS missionaries at Kuruman, Hamilton and Edwards, prepared wooden doors and windows for the chapel, but found it impossible to find trees that were large enough to make beams for the roof. In 1835, Moffat accompanied Smith’s expedition to the capital of Mzilikazi, leader of the Ndebele who had conquered large areas of what would become known as the Transvaal. He sought and was given permission to harvest suitable timber, taken to Kuruman in two large wagons.36
Ivory handled knife, with associated label
Presented to Robert Moffat by Sechele, leader of the Bakwena in what is now Botswana.
Presented by Moffat to the South African Museum, Cape Town (Iziko S.A.M. 330)
View of the Kuruman Station in South Africa
Printed on the cover of the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle, May 1840.
In March 1840, less than a year after Moffat’s return to Britain, the cover of the Missionary Chronicle featured a ‘View of the Kuruman Mission Station in South Africa’. This was based on an image painted by Charles Davidson Bell, an artist who accompanied Smith’s expedition.37 The same image would later feature in Moffat’s 1842 book as ‘A Bird’s Eye View of the Kuruman’.38
In the foreground are the well-tended mission gardens, surrounded by hedges, facing a row of rectangular buildings including the chapel (its roof must have been imagined by Bell since it had not been completed when he visited). The description, printed in 1840, explains:
The Mission Church occupies the centre — the buildings on either side the Church are the dwelling house of the Missionaries — the conical buildings in the rear, the huts of the natives; and the mountain in the distance marks the locality of the outstation, Hamhana.39
In striking contrast to the Mission Museum, where the conical Tswana house occupied a prominent central place, such houses are only a background feature of this image, located at the rear and referred to in the caption as ‘the huts of the natives’. Such derogatory and dismissive terms had not always been so readily used.
When William Burchell published an account of his visit to Dithakong in July 1812, he provided a section and plan of ‘Bachapin house’, composed, like Moffat’s model, of a series of concentric circles. Each dwelling was, according to Burchell between 40 and 60 feet in diameter, enclosed by an outer fence or wall that was between four and a half and seven feet tall, providing protection from enemies, wild animals and strong winds.40
The fence could be crossed at a single gap in the front, narrower at the bottom, with the top only wide enough for a pair of shoulders to pass. The enclosed space was divided between a front-court and back-yard, both with a floor made from clay tempered with cattle dung that was ‘beaten or spread exactly level, and perfectly smooth’.41 Moffat’s model only includes a fence at the front, although the location of the back fence was marked with paper.
While the design of the house varied ‘according to the wants and inclinations of its owner’, Burchell suggested that he hadn’t seen a single building with straight lines or a right angle, suggesting:
it seems therefore, that their own observation and experience, has taught these people by practical demonstration, the axiom that a circle comprises a greater area than any other figure of equal circumference… this, the making of the outer fence, or the walls, is performed with as little labor as possible.42
The roofs of the larger houses covered a space of around 26 feet in diameter, extending beyond the walls to create a veranda-style space that was shaded from the sun and rain. As well as providing a sleeping place, the house was also used for storing:
clothing and arms, for which, darkness is convenient as it conceals the property from the knowledge of their neighbours or of strangers. The only opening therefore, is the doorway; which may be better described as, a hole in the wall just large enough to admit a person to creep through, and of the shape of an irregular oval, the larger end of which being upwards, and the smaller a foot above the floor.43
It is not easy to make out from photographs, but when I shone a light into the interior of Moffat’s model house at the British Museum, I could see that the entrance was indeed an irregular oval. Burchell praised the ‘neatness, good order and cleanness’ of the dwellings he saw, particularly evident in the ‘better houses’, suggesting:
If we consider the habits and customs of this nation, their mode of life, and the state of society among them, we must acknowledge that such dwellings as have now been described are exceedingly convenient and perfectly suited to every want and fitted to every circumstance44
One key feature of such houses was that they could be built from locally available materials whenever the motse or village was relocated, a not infrequent occurrence. However, they needed constant renewal, in particular through re-thatching and re-plastering the walls and floor after seasonal thunderstorms.
Birdseye View of Kuruman Missionary Station
Original watercolour painted by Charles Davidson Bell. Note that the front gable, imagined by Bell for the Church was never built, and so removed from the engraving above.
'Section & Plan of a Bachapin [Batlhaping] House
Originally published as Plate 9 in William Burchell’s 1824 Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, (Volume 2, facing p. 515). According to Burchell:
In order to show its structure, it is here represeneted as cut through the middle, in a direction from the great corn-jar to the side of the door-way in the outer fence. In the ground plan, A is the veranda, B, the outer room, C, the inner, or central room; D, the storeroom; E, the corn-house; F, corn-jars; G, the servants’ house; H, the fireplace; and I, the outer fence.
Model house on board base, made by Moffat at Dithakong (c. 1821-1823)
The location of the rear fence is shown with white paper.
While some houses had no further interval divisions, Burchell’s plan includes an inner apartment:
frequently built in the shape of a cone, or of a half-ellipsis, the point of which reaches up to the height of the roof, which serves to support and strengthen. In other instances, as in the Plate, its form is cylindrical; and this appeared to be an improved construction.45
According to Stephen Kay, a Methodist missionary who visited the large settlement of Kaditshwene in August 1821, this apartment was ‘the hidden shrine of the Bootchuana Penates, this sanctum in which the more important domestic vessels and property of the inmates are preserved; and during the winter months it is employed as a sleeping apartment by the family’.46
The anthropologist Jean Comaroff has suggested that the Setswana word for house, ntlo, establishes a metaphoric connection with the uterine interior of the female body, suggesting that the house was ‘the site of delicate transformative processes associated with procreation and nurture’.47 Kay’s description of the inner apartment as ‘the hidden shrine of the Bootchuana penates’ (a Latin term used to describe Roman household gods, including representations of important ancestors) suggests that this inner space was an important locus of ancestral power.
Original Sketch by John Campbell of the interior of Senosi's house at Kaditshwene, May 1820
Campbell’s caption describes this as his Senosi’s principal cornstore, but one can see the form of animal paintings with which houses were decorated, as well as a number of ceramic vessels on the ledge, a likely focus for ancestral rites.
Special Collections, National Libarary of South Africa, Cape Town (ARP 9, p.114)
Houses of the type depicted by Moffat’s model, built largely built by women, provided family groups with their own enclosing body, with space at their centre for venerated ancestors, made present at least partly through the presence of ancestral possessions. In the Setswana Bible, Moffat ended up translating ‘God’ as Modimo, which the historian Paul Landau has suggested may have simply referred to an ultimate ‘ancestor’ in earlier times.48
While ancestors and their spirits were also a feature of ceremonial life in Polynesia (Chapters 12 & 13), there does not seem to have been any obvious southern African equivalent to the carved representations of spirits which became a focus for missionary invective against ‘idols’, hence their absence in the missionary museum. One does have to wonder, however, how conscious Moffat was that people venerated particular animals when he gave the skin and bones of two crocodiles to the Missionary Museum.
Indeed, John Mokotedi Serian was one of the ‘people of the crocodile’ (Bakwena) for whom the killing and eating of crocodiles was certainly forbidden, so how comfortable he would have felt travelling travelling to Britain with the remains of two of these creatures can only be imagined.
Nevertheless, Moffat seems to have recognised an important difference between southern African ceremonial practices and those in other mission fields, telling a revealing story at the farewell service held for him in Edinburgh. A Tswana man, he said, came into his house, sat down and leafed through a copy of Missionary Sketches.
Familiar with the portraits on display in Moffat’s house, as well as the ‘figures of game, and horses and men’ drawn by women on the ‘walls of their houses’, on encountering missionary images of ‘idols’ he asked Moffat’s little girl ‘What game is this?”
When told him they showed carvings worshipped by other nations, he accused her of fibbing and sought out Moffat for confirmation. When he confirmed that the people who made such objects of veneration from wood and stone had the same capacities as himself — heads, lungs, and the capacity to speak — he replied ‘After this, never say that the Bechuanas are either foolish or ignorant”. Taking out his own whistle, carved from ivory, he asked:
What would my people think if I were to worship that?… They would think I was a madman, and would throw me over a precipice, and cover me with stones.49
Moffat asserted that this proved the absence of idolatry in southern Africa, although the manner in which the man thought he would be killed suggests he may have believed he would ultimately have been accused of witchcraft if he behaved in this way.
Moffat went on to tell his audience that the Botswana ‘can reason, and reason well; that they can express themselves in language that would vie with the or more civilised nations’, giving the example of ‘one of their public parliaments’ where you will see:
the profoundest order, while orator after orator, or senator – call them if you please – after senator, rises and describes the state of the nation, the different movements that are to be attended to, or plans that are to be devised or exertions made, in order to save the state or save the town. I have heard them cutting hairs, I should almost say.50
While clear about the intellectual capacities of individual Africans, as well as the decorum of their political institutions, Moffat seems felt that their lives nevertheless needed to be reoriented around a Christian God. The large stone chapel at Kuruman arguably reflects this attitude in material form. Rather than being hidden at centre of domestic space, Modimo, the ultimate ancestor, was provided with a prominent and permanent space at the centre of his new community.
When Moffat first proposed establishing his mission at Seoding, Mothibi had objected that there not enough trees from which to build houses. While Moffat partly solved this problem by building the mission buildings from stone, and locating roof beams elsewhere, the mission’s location likely limited the scale of the houses which could be easily built by the Africans who made their homes there. The establishment of a permanent stone-built church at Kuruman coincided with a reduction in scale of the houses built by African Christian for themselves, and, over time the removal of sacred space from their centre.
Cover of Missionary Sketches No. III
Showing The Family Idols of Pomare, reprinted August 1820 (see Chapter 4).
The Bechuana Parliament
Image by George Baxter, printed in Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa by Robert Moffat, 1842, opposite p. 349. Note the houses in the background. A version of this scene, also with houses behind can be found in the background of the colour portrait of Robert Moffat above.
3D Digital Model of the Chapel at Kuruman
Made by the Zamani Project in July 2018. The packed earth floor is visible inside the model.
Given that Moffat kept copies of Missionary Sketches at his home, he likely followed reports of conversions in Polynesia, where the efforts of his ‘missionary brother’, John Williams, were generally crowned by the communal building of substantial new places of worship, as at Rarotonga (Chapter 12). Indeed, the 1826 catalogue of the Missionary Museum described the display of the ‘Household Idols of Pomare’ in front of:
A large model Church, 712 feet long, built for Pomare, for the worship of Jehovah.51
Such Polynesian edifices, frequently built at the site of a former marae (ceremonial enclosures), were largely initiated and overseen by Polynesian leaders. The stone chapel at Kuruman, however, seems to have been overwhelmingly built by Europeans, with Africans only providing unskilled labour (excepting the earlier chapel built by Jan Arendt).
The article about the chapel, printed in the Missionary Chronicle in 1840, underlined that it had largely been a European effort, suggesting that:
The raising of the roof was found to be an herculean and dangerous task, in a country where there were neither blocks nor tackles, and but few individuals who dared to trust themselves on naked walls. While the roof was proceeding, the natives often remarked that the Missionaries must have been brought up in a baboon’s country, and therefore accustomed to precipices and walls.52
The Chapel finally opened in November 1838, shortly before Moffat and his family returned to Britain. The final paragraph of the Missionary Chronicle article pointed out that a shortfall of just under £100 remained on the chapel, presumably hoping the article would stimulate further donations to clear this.
The model house at the Missionary Museum in London, built by Moffat at Maruping, and the stone church, built under his watch at Kuruman, appear, at first sight to be inversions of one another — a small-scale African building made from clay and wood as against a large-scale European style building, made from stone. Both are, however, interesting hybrids. The model sits on pieces of flat planed wood, presumably taken from a wooden box, made in Europe or the Cape. The stone chapel relies on two key African building technologies for its ongoing maintenance, thatching using local grasses and the plastering of its packed earth and dung floor.
While credit was given to Moffat in the catalogue for building the model, and to Millen, Hume, Hamilton and Edwards in missionary publications for their contributions to building the chapel, its maintenance always depended on African labour. Missionary texts sometimes make a careful distinction between the chapel, as a building, and the Church, composed of a body of baptised worshipping members. In this case at least, the chapel appears to reflect the kind of Church Moffat was attempting to build at Kuruman – one overwhelming directed by Europeans.
According to Burchell, the back-yard of the house of a Kgosi generally had ‘a small hut for their immediate servant or attendant’.53 It is surely significant that the surviving missionary houses at the Kuruman mission also have such small huts in their back yards. In climbing from his lowly origins as a cabin boy and apprentice gardener to a status equivalent to a Tswana Kgosi, Moffat evidently expected to find willing servants among African Christians.
The mission premises at Kuruman
Colour print in oils by George Baxter, bound at the front of Robert Moffat’s 1842 Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa.
The mission premises at Kuruman
Original watercolour by Charles Davidson Bell, 1835.
In producing a coloured image to appear opposite the title page of Moffat’s book, George Baxter used another painting made by Charles Davidson Bell of the Kuruman Mission. This shows the chapel at its centre, bathed in light, flanked on its left by Moffat’s house. There are a number of Africans in the background of the image, one pushing a wheelbarrow, another carrying a rake. Two women on the right of the image appear to be carrying firewood on their heads, presumably gathered in the surrounding area to supply the mission.
In the foreground of the scene, Baxter superimposed the commanding figures of Robert Moffat and Robert Hamilton, both White and Male. Moffat appears to be pointing to a book, presumably the recently printed New Testament translation. John Mokotedi Serian is nowhere to be seen.
When Moffat replied to Rev. Binney’s address during the evening meeting on 23 January 1843, he made a number of remarks about ‘native agency’:
I have, it is true, not all the confidence that some, less experienced, have in certain kinds of native agency. Native agency may very properly be compared to a body of sepoys, who will fight well while they have good English officers to lead them on.54
How did John Mokotedi Serian, sitting near to Moffat, feel when he heard his patron assert a subaltern status for himself and his people within the missionary enterprise? A week later, they boarded a steamer together at London Bridge, transferring to the Fortitude at Gravesend, which took them to the Cape.
On board the ship, Mokotedi was upset at not being allowed to eat at the Captain’s table and evidently refused to do ‘an iota of service’ for the Moffat family, complaining that Moffat had not properly acknowledged his role in their translation work. According to a letter, subsequently written by Moffat to the Directors:
The officers of the ship took John in his black sabbath clothes, stuck him into a flower [flour] bag just emptied, & sent him on deck to shew the company they they could make him what he so earnestly coveted to be, a white man.55
Mokotedi was expelled from the Church on his return to Africa, although he evidently continued to regard himself as a Christian. Nearly a decade later, in May 1854, he wrote to Rev. Dr. Charles Orpen following a series of meetings with African leaders, about a school being planned for their children at Cape Town:
And they have asket many times this quistion. They say. How is it that the Missionary has been so long a time in this country upworts to more than 50 yeas, and yet we have no Minesters no School Masters, made out of our own country men? We do not onderstant this; that we must be taught only by the white men, and we the blacks will never be able to do it ourselfs. The white men is making a fools of us. They are teaching us only for to oby them and for there on conviniances. If so be that we shall awes be tought and never be able to learn, never come to be like the Englishmen it is then of no use to learn at all.56
The original missionary dream of universal Christian brotherhood was increasingly undermined by such questions of race. What Catherine Hall has called ‘Fault-lines in the Family of Man’ would only become more active and dangerous as white settlers increasingly followed missionaries into the interior of the African continent.57
Comments
This is an experiment in writing – intended to stretch the idea of the academic monograph.
I am keen to recognise and incorporate the input and expertise of others into the writing process, so I would welcome any comments or feedback.
Notes
1 1843. ‘The Opium Trade in China’, Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for March 1843, p. 150: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HMrSQR8cXs0C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA150#v=onepage&q&f=false
2 William Ellis resigned the post of Foreign Secretary due to ill health in 1841. See Chapter 19.
3 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 143;
Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, p. 111.
4 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 132-154; 1843. ‘Departure of Rev. R. Moffat and Friends’, Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for March 1843, p. 152: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HMrSQR8cXs0C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA152#v=onepage&q&f=false
5 Robert Moffat and his family had arrived on 12 June 1839, so were in Britain when news of the death of John Williams, arrived in the Spring of 1840.
6 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 140-141.
7 Campbell was the Scottish Minister at Moorfields Tabernacle in London, a namesake of John Campbell who traveled to Africa, described in Chapter 3, who died in April 1840.
8 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 134-135: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ilJiAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=departure%20of%20moffat%20missionary%20service%20campbell&pg=PA135#v=onepage&q&f=false
9 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, p.135.
10 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 135-136.
11 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, p. 136.
12 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 137.
13 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, p. 138.
14 1843. ‘The London Missionary Society’. Illustrated London News: 342.
15 The Library of Useful Knowledge. 1830. The New Zealanders. London: Charles Knight, p. 157. This included at least one not from New Zealand, but from Tahiti (the whale bone fan handle sent to London by Pomare II – Chapter 4). See p. 127;
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XEX3h7mDz2IC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=The%20New%20Zealanders&pg=PA157#v=onepage&q&f=false
16 CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming correspondence, Box 7, Folder 5 – Henry Syer Cuming to Bennet Esq. 29th April 1839.
17 CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming correspondence, Box 7, Folder 5 – Henry Syer Cuming to Bennet Esq. 29th April 1839.
18 (1840). ‘The London Missionary Museum’. London Saturday Journal, William Smith. 56, Saturday January 25, 1840: 60-61: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lcgRAAAAYAAJ&vq=museum&pg=PA60#v=onepage&q&f=false
19 Prichard, J.C. 1843. The Natural History of Man; Comprising inquiries into the modifying influence of physical and moral agencies on the different tribes of the human family. London: H. Bailliere, opposite p.314: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oby7zQEACAAJ&pg=PA314-IA3#v=onepage&q&f=false
20 See Wingfield, C. 2018. ‘Articles of Dress, Domestic Utensils, Arms and Other Curiosities: Excavating Early 19th-Century Collections from Southern Africa at the London Missionary Society Museum.’ Journal of Southern African Studies, 44(4), pp. 723-742: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1491519; Catalogue of the Missionary Museum, Austin Friars. 1826. London: Printed by W. Phillips. British Library 4766.e.19.(2.).
21 Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, p. 111-112.
22 Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, p. 111-112.
23 Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, p. 111; CWM/LMS/South Africa/Incoming correspondence, Box 21, Folder 1, B – Moffat, 3 November 1845.
24 1843. ‘Juvenile Missionary Meeting at Exeter Hall’, Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for May 1842, p. 247: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4EawDuiTdtsC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20magazine%201841&pg=PA247#v=onepage&q&f=false
25 British support for the expedition was famously satirised as ‘telescopic philanthropy’ by Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1852-3), in his description of Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her own family while obsessed with the ‘Borrioboola-Gha venture’; 1842. Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr Samuel Crowther, who, with the Sanction of Her Majesty’s Government, accompanied the Expedition up the Niger, in 1841, in behold of the Church Missionary Society. London: Hatchard and Son; https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZRpOAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=journal%20of%20the%20niger%20expedition%20crowther&pg=PP9#v=onepage&q&f=false
26 Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 46-47.
27 Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, pp 50-56.
28 Schapera, I.1951. Apprenticeship at Kuruman : being the journals and letters of Robert and Mary Moffat, 1820-1828. London, Chatto & Windus, p. 72; Robert Moffat to Alexander Moffat, 12 April 1823. C.A. Archives. M.9/1/5. Doc. 4/1823.
29 Brenthurst Library, MS. 651/1f, Andrew Smith to Robert Moffat, 9 January 1825.
30 Smith, A. 1836. ‘Report of the Expedition for Exploring Central Africa’. The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol 6, p. 411.
31 Burrow, J. 1971. Travels in the Wilds of Africa: Being the Diary of a Young Scientific Assistant who Accompanied Sir Andrew Smith in the Expedition of 1834-1836. AA Balkema, South Africa.
32 1830. The Report of the Directors to the Thirty-Sixth General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called The London Missionary Society, on Thursday, May 13, 1830. London: Westley and Davis, pp.85-86; An extra wing was subsequently added at the back of the building to accommodate more people.
33 1831. The Report of the Directors to the Thirty-Seventh General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called The London Missionary Society, on Thursday, May 12, 1831. London: Westley and Davis, pp. 90-92.
34 1833. The Report of the Directors to the Thirty-Ninth General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called The London Missionary Society, on Thursday, May 9th, 1833. London: Westley and Davis, p. 92.
35 Moffat, R. 1842. Missionary labours and scenes in Southern Africa. London, J. Snow, p. 605: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8CFBAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=life%20and%20times%20of%20robert%20and%20mary%20moffat&pg=PA605#v=onepage&q&f=false ; Moffat, J. S. 1890. The Lives of Robert and Mary Moffat, London, pp. 181-182: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JKYqAQAAIAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=life%20and%20times%20of%20robert%20and%20mary%20moffat&pg=PA181#v=onepage&q&f=false
36 Moffat, J. S. 1890. The Lives of Robert and Mary Moffat, London, pp. 197-198: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JKYqAQAAIAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=life%20and%20times%20of%20robert%20and%20mary%20moffat&pg=PA198#v=onepage&q&f=false
37 Smith had returned to London in 1837, exhibiting artwork and items collected on the exhibition at Egyptian Hall, where they were visited by John Philip (Chapter 15). It seems very likely that Moffat met Smith in London, following his return, and was given permission to use Bell’s image of Kuruman to develop the print for the Missionary Chronicle. The article ended by pointing out that although the chapel had opened in November 1838, it had cost 316l. 4s. 7d. to build, with 243l. 15s. 10 1/2 d. raised in the Cape Colony, leaving a debt of over 72l., as well as 20 to 30/. require for its completion. Moffat was clearly keen to use his time in Europe to cement his position at Kuruman.
38 Moffat, R. 1842. Missionary labours and scenes in Southern Africa. London, J. Snow, p. 560: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8CFBAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=life%20and%20times%20of%20robert%20and%20mary%20moffat&pg=PA560#v=onepage&q&f=false
39 1840. ‘South Africa – Lattakoo Mission’, The Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for March 1840, pp. 141-143: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yNBGAQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA141#v=onepage&q&f=false
40 Burchell, W. J. 1824. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London, Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, pp.515-522: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_78NAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=william%20burchell%20travels&pg=PA514-IA2#v=onepage&q&f=false
41 Burchell, W. J. 1824. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London, Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, p.517: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_78NAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=william%20burchell%20travels&pg=PA517#v=onepage&q&f=false
42 Burchell, W. J. 1824. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London, Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, p.517: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_78NAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=william%20burchell%20travels&pg=PA517#v=onepage&q&f=false
43 Burchell, W. J. 1824. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London, Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, p.518: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_78NAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=william%20burchell%20travels&pg=PA518#v=onepage&q&f=false
44 Burchell, W. J. 1824. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London, Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, p.522: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_78NAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=william%20burchell%20travels&pg=PA522#v=onepage&q&f=false
45 Burchell, W. J. 1824. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London, Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, p.519: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_78NAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=william%20burchell%20travels&pg=PA519#v=onepage&q&f=false
46 Kay, S. 1833. Travels and Researches in Caffraria, describing the character, customs and moral condition of the tribes inhabiting that portion of Southern Africa. London, John Mason, pp. 227-228.
47 Comaroff, J. 1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance : the culture and history of a South African people. Chicago ; London, University of Chicago Press, p, 56.
48 Landau, P. S. 2010. Popular politics in the history of South Africa, 1400-1948. New York, Cambridge University Press, p.93.
49 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 143;
Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 72-74: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ilJiAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=departure%20of%20moffat%20missionary%20service%20campbell&pg=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false
50 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 143;
Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, p. 75: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ilJiAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=departure%20of%20moffat%20missionary%20service%20campbell&pg=PA75#v=onepage&q&f=false
51 Catalogue of the Missionary Museum, Austin Friars. 1826. London: Printed by W. Phillips. British Library 4766.e.19.(2.), pp. 17-19.
52 1840. ‘South Africa – Lattakoo Mission’, The Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for March 1840, pp. 143: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yNBGAQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA143#v=onepage&q&f=false
53 Burchell, W. J. 1824. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London, Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, p.521: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_78NAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=william%20burchell%20travels&pg=PA521#v=onepage&q&f=false
54 Campbell, J. DD. 1843. The Farewell Services of Robert Moffat, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. London: John Snow, pp. 143;
Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 148-149: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ilJiAAAAcAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=departure%20of%20moffat%20missionary%20service%20campbell&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q&f=false
55 Volz, S.C. 2011. African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Peter Lang, p. 111-112.
56 The printed text preserves the original spelling of Mokoteri: Hodgson, J. 1983. ‘An African’s letter from Griqua Town, 1854’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 38,1, p. 36.
57 Hall, C. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867. Cambridge: Polity Press.