Abstract
Tiyo Soga, the first black minister ordained in Scotland by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1856, was, by any standards, a conflicted character. He stood both in and between two worlds and suffered from the vulnerability that emerged from his dual allegiances. Yet he made a significant contribution to the mission history of South Africa, particularly through his early influence on the development of black consciousness and black nationalism, which were to make significant contributions to black thinking in the 20th century. Soga’s life and ministry are set in the context of Michael Ashley’s concept of ‘universes in collision’.
Highlights
When Dr Gideon Khabela (1996) wrote his book on Tiyo Soga, The struggle of the gods: Tiyo Soga, a study in Christianity and the Africa culture, it was an attempt to challenge the mainline churches ‘for having misrepresented the African culture’ (Khabela 1996:1) in a context where it was assumed that ‘in the inner character of the African lurked the thief and the recidivist criminal, the dangerous and the potentially mad’ (Crais 1992:138)
I consider Tiyo Soga to have managed to maintain a balance of contradictions within himself – neither black nor white, neither African nor European, neither a slave nor a master, neither arrogant nor humble, neither British nationalist nor African nationalist, neither an admirer of the British way of life nor a despiser of his own African culture
Tile’s Tembu Church and Mzimba’s Presbyterian Church of Africa, both formed towards the close of the 19th century, demonstrate some traits of Soga’s thinking regarding indigenisation, which integrated the Victorian idea of self-help as expressed in his The inheritance of my children: As men of colour, live for the elevation of your degraded, despised, down-trodden people
Summary
When Dr Gideon Khabela (1996) wrote his book on Tiyo Soga, The struggle of the gods: Tiyo Soga, a study in Christianity and the Africa culture, it was an attempt to challenge the mainline churches ‘for having misrepresented the African culture’ (Khabela 1996:1) in a context where it was assumed that ‘in the inner character of the African lurked the thief and the recidivist criminal, the dangerous and the potentially mad’ (Crais 1992:138) He used Tiyo Soga as a foil to such views: Tiyo Soga was to be the most famous of all Xhosa converts. He lived in a time and context where the confluence of two cultures collided, and throughout his life ‘he wrestled in the deep waters of conflicting cultures’ (Williams 1983:10) and came to be viewed among his own people as ‘one who had bridged over the apparently impassible gulph’ between black and white (Soga in Williams 1983:73)
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