Christianity, Colonialism and the Postmodern Project in South Africa: The Comaroffs Revisited

Abstract

forces or structures. And some activities are more important than others: spiritual life and agrarian practice, clothing and architecture, labor and bodily disposition ... became central and were often contested; much more so than, say, patterns of public decision making or rituals of office (1997, 28-29). One problem for the Comaroffs is how to represent this conversation. The meat of their argument lies in the familiar distinction in history, journalism, and literary studies between what they term realism and rhetoric in cultural texts. Realistic representations present material in a linear, chronological, narrative fashion; privilege written texts; focus on information, especially about persons and events; and rely on factual evidence that is presented in what is regarded as an objective and unbiased (read balanced, fair, impartial) manner. Rhetorical representations are representations that often present material in a non-linear, non-chronological, nonnarrative fashion; privilege art, ritual, pageantry and performance; employ oral and visual texts; and draw on a range of verbal, nonverbal, and visual images or tropes to interpret the world. The Comaroffs rightly reject the popular assumption that history and its representations are two distinct entities one mirrors or reflects reality and the other is reality or that realist modes of presenting history stand opposed to rhetorical modes: ... history and its representations are not nicely distinguishable. To the contrary: history lies in its representations, for representation is as much the making of history as it is consciousness speaking out ... [rhetoric] is not a mere aesthetic embellishment of a truth that lies elsewhere [and realism] is but one among many modes of constructing past and present, with no greater claim on authenticity, no less attention to aesthetics (1991, 35-36). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.198 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 06:41:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 186 CJAS / RCEA 32:I 1998 They decry the positive stereotypes associated with realistic texts and the negative stereotypes associated with rhetorical texts, arguing that rhetorical evidence may represent African realities more effectively than the kind of realistic evidence presented often in colonial narratives or, from the later nineteenth century, in narratives written by the emerging African petty bourgeoisie. The fourth and final point on the Comaroffs' cultural map is an elaborate rendering of three concepts colonialism, modernity, and the everyday that are positioned in relation to each other. Each exhibit the material and symbolic tensions that characterize the modern/postmodern divide. The Comaroffs note that these concepts have been depicted simplistically by modernists in terms that privilege Eurocentric readings of the bourgeois subject in non-western culture. Whether modernity as modernization, for example, is viewed positively as development (and presumably, in its contemporary guise, as globalization) or negatively as dependency/underdevelopment, it is largely framed by a hierarchical political, economic, and social trajectory from centre to periphery. The colonial project is depicted in similar terms as the control by Europeans over non-Europeans. And the everyday the ordinary, the mundane is modernityas-lived. Nonconformist missionaries principal players in the Southern Tswana case study were obsessed with the natural habitat of the ordinary, average person at home, at work, at prayer and at play because the everyday brought the Protestant ethic in line with the spirit of capitalism ... it was the taken-for-granted medium of both European civilization and salvation (1997, 30-31 ). The Comaroffs also caution against tendencies in postmodern readings of colonialism that focus exclusively on human agency, especially the subaltern subject, read pre-colonial representations mainly as traditions invented by Europeans, or reverse the colonial encounter and read the conversation mainly in terms of the non-European's influence on the European. They find most extreme the Derridean-derived deconstructionist view that treats