‘Praying is the Work of Men, Not the Work of Women’: The Response of Bahananwa and Vhavenda Women to Conversion in Late Nineteenth-Century Lutheran Missionary Territories

ABSTRACT

In this article we take up Dorothy Hodgson's appeal for a stronger gender analysis of the process of missionisation by revisiting Adrian Hastings's 1993 essay in which he argued that ‘again and again in a mission history … the early significant baptisms were mostly of women’. A close reading of the reportage of the Lutheran missionaries of the Berlin Mission Society is undertaken to establish whether or not this trend is also applicable to the Bahananwa and the Vhavenda of the Soutpansberg region, former Transvaal, South Africa, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. According to our findings, Bahananwa and Vhavenda women were not, as has been concluded by Hastings with reference to many other African case studies, more eager to convert than men, and certainly not representative of the ‘early significant baptisms’ in these respective communities. Unlike Hodgson's claim for so many other societies in the early stages of the missionary encounter, women were also not predominant in the early Bahananwa or Vhavenda Christian congregations. While Hastings does make provision in his model for exceptional cases, our evidence for the Bahananwa and the Vhavenda contests his assumptions that women's resistance to conversion should be explained in terms of female religiosity and conservatism.

Keywords:

• Bahananwa
• conversion
• Berlin Mission
• Lutheran
• Soutpansberg
• Vhavenda
• women