Convening Black Intimacy : Christianity, Gender, and Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

Authors

• Natasha Erlank

Files

Series

New African Histories

Description

An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century.

This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality.

Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity.

In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.

Copyright Statement

Convening Black Intimacy © 2022 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821447840

Publication Date

11-8-2022

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

family history, history of marriage, customary law, lobola, polygamy, sexuality, South African history, Black South Africans, African history, social history, cultural history, twentieth-century Africa, twentieth-century South Africa, colonial South Africa, Christianity in Africa, African Christianity, missionary Christianity, mission history, Christian conversion, religious change, religion and society, religion and culture, Christianity and modernity, Christianity and social change, intimacy, Black intimacy, intimate life, family and society, marriage, marriage customs, marriage and religion, history of sexuality, sexual modernity, sexual ethics, gender, gender roles, gender relations, masculinity, femininity, family life, kinship, domestic life, household formation, morality, moral values, affect and emotion, affective history, emotional life, social transformation, modernization, African modernities, tradition and modernity, customary practices, African traditions, cultural change, social identity, Black middle class, educated Africans, class formation, middle-class aspirations, respectability, respectability politics, social mobility, migrant labor, labor migration, migrant workers, labor history, urbanization, colonial labor systems, Christianity and family, Christianity and marriage, Christianity and gender, Christianity and sexuality, Christianity and morality, bridewealth, bridewealth practices, customary marriage, African family structures, African kinship systems, law and society, colonial law, legal history, social history of law, law courts, court records, African legal history, mission archives, church archives, archival research, Black press, African newspapers, popular literature, print culture, African literature, identity formation, community formation, race and society, Black communities, colonial governance, colonialism, postcolonial studies, African studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, family studies, marriage studies, religious studies, history of emotions, anthropology of kinship, sociology of religion, religion and gender, religion and sexuality, social change in Africa, historical sociology, Christian influence, social norms, cultural continuity, cultural adaptation, indigenous practices, African social history, modern African identities, African families, intimate relationships, domestic relationships, love and marriage, morality and modernity, mission-educated Africans, African churches, religious communities

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Family, Life Course, and Society | Gender and Sexuality | Labor History | Race and Ethnicity | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Religion | Social History | Sociology of Religion

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Erlank, Natasha, "Convening Black Intimacy : Christianity, Gender, and Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa" (2022). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 123.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/123