VOC occupation kept a tight rein on religion The way we were
SOUTH Africans have enjoyed religious freedom on an incremental basis for the past two centuries. The Batavian government’s 1804 legislation gave Muslims the space to practise Islam and paved the way for the evangelisation of slaves and other “heathens” by a plethora of Christian mission societies.
This in turn stimulated the rise of distinctive African Zionist churches and charismatic movements which continue to flourish, despite the bizarre behaviour of some self-proclaimed pastors.
Our constitution states that everyone has the right to freedom of religion, belief and opinion – ideas that were unthinkable during the VOC occupation. The Dutch brought a special form of Protestantism to the Cape: a DRC theology in which the state protected and also controlled the church.
Church membership was acquired through baptism administered by a Company-appointed minister. Children of VOC employees and free burghers were routinely christened in the Reformed Church, regardless whether their parents were French Protestants, German or Swedish Lutherans or secret Catholics, Jews or atheists.
Indigenous people and slaves were eligible as well. All infants born at the Slave Lodge were baptised in the DRC church next door, which conferred no advantage apart from the fact that they would be entitled to apply for manumission in the unlikely event of finding some means of obtaining their freedom. They were also given religious instruction in the slave school within the Lodge.
Burgher slave children did not automatically receive the sacrament, nor did successive VOC ministers bother to try and convert the local Khoikhoi (apart from one or two minor exceptions).
In time, the spiritual ignorance of the indigenous inhabitants began to bother certain clergymen in the Netherlands and they recruited a volunteer evangelist who was prepared to start a mission at the Cape. He was German Moravian Georg Schmidt, who had already spent six years in confinement for addressing private meetings in Bohemia.
His religious leader, Count Zinzendorf, applied to the Council of Seventeen for permission to send him to the Cape, assuring them that he would not interfere in worldly matters nor disturb master-slave relationships. The aspirant missionary was given a set of stern instructions: he was to go out alone as punishment for past weakness, he should work hard and not accept presents or honours, and he should settle among Khoikhoi who understood Dutch.
Schmidt, the son of a peasant, reached Table Bay in July 1737 after a seven-month voyage. The skipper of his ship predicted he would fail, but he was inured to adversity. He founded the first Protestant mission in southern Africa at what is now Genadendal and saw it take root, but engineered his own downfall by daring to administer the sacrament of baptism.