Tswana

Abstract: Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. JOHN L. COMAROFF and JEAN COMAROFF. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 588 pp. This is a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, sequel to the much-discussed Of revelation and revolution, Volume one: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. While Volume One dealt primarily with the initial encounter between British evangelists and the Southern Tswana of South Africa, Volume Two moves the story along, both chronologically and thematically, to how, over the course of a century, the encounter reshaped both the Southern Tswana and the British. In the process the Comaroffs move beyond the realm of "the long conversation" to examine changes in the material realities and notions of production, value, dress, architecture, medicine, and rights, and the hybrid form: which resulted. But the overarching theme of Volume One runs through Volume Two as well: that colonialism is best conceptualized as a cultural process rendered through the everyday and the mundane, and that this process is exemplified in the civilizing project of the missionaries. As with their first volume, this one is packed with original, occasionally brilliant, insights. While a sense of chronology occasionally falls victim to the authors' determination not to write a "history of events" - something as "apocalyptic" (p. 210) as rinderpest is mentioned only sporadically, in Chapters 3 and 4 - the authors deal to a greater extent than before with the economic and political processes of colonialism. The material realities of production, labor migration, and people's health are discussed in almost as much depth as the creation of modernist subjects and the "flow and counterflow of signs and objects" (p. 5). The study ranges widely across the historical and temporal landscape. We are treated to imaginative analyses of the ways in which value systems grounded in cattle and cash became linked, the conservatism of Southern Tswana women's clothing, European appropriations of African healing, and the ways in which the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party are each heir to a particular strand of colonial discourses on "rights." Yet - also as with Volume One - the authors ultimately offer a better sense of the European world than the Southern Tswana world. The thematic chapters usually begin with a thoughful examination of the British context, then move the reader to the terrain on which Tswana and British meet, with no comparable sense of what pre-existed the arrival of British missionaries in the region. This imbalance, which was widely criticized by Africanists after the publication of Volume One, is less pronounced here, perhaps because the documentary record is vastly richer for this later period. But the problematic implications for Volume One lurk in this volume as well. For example, the authors argue that the three classes of Tswana emerging as a result of their encounter with evangelists and colonial economies upper, middle, and lower peasantries -- generally paralleled differences in people's domestication of European commodities, healing, notions of production and rights, and the Gospel. …