South African Faith history in Global Perspective: Research Literature available: Books and Articles

Such marginalisation has involved far more than simply excluding the colonised peoples from the major decision-making processes in the countries concerned, or pushing them aside to the margins of society.There has been another devastating aspect, and that has been the silencing of the voices of the colonised. The significance of their contribution to world civilisation and the course of history has been largely ignored and substantially reduced.

While disseminating the material contained in certain series of VOC documents vested in the Cape Town Archives notes were made of certain individuals who made an impression on the inquiring mind.It was surprising to see how much information could be gathered from these series in order to conduct case studies, for our purpose Angela of Bengalen, the royal princes Loring Passir and Dipa Nagera of Java, Nicolaas Ondatje of Colombo and Manual Thuart of Tutucurin, complemented by a case study of the French refugee, Prieur du Plessis, a protestant Christian. The fact is that these people who honoured different religious beliefs, enriched the contents of the various cases.

There are many debates about Cape slavery. Was slavery here “mild” as the slave-owners claimed or was this a Cape of torments for slaves? Did the owners control their
slaves by means of whips and chains, or were psychological and cultural forms of control (like integration into the family household) more important? How accurate is it to refer to slaves as “Malays”?

In the last decade, however, a number of studies of Cape slavery have significantly advanced understanding of the pre-industrial Cape. These have been influenced by a variety of factors: the need to correct historiographical neglect, to explore class and race in Cape history, and to apply insights gained from slave studies in other societies to the Cape. This article surveys the development of the study of slavery at the Cape, and highlights important features of older and newer literature. It also argues that continuities between the pre-industrial Cape and later South African society are more significant than previously acknowledged.

Recently, some work has been done on these slave cases, but not in terms of narratives. Likewise, there is a new interest in post-narratives dealing with Cape slavery, but nobody has as yet connected these modern reincarnations with the earlier historical narratives. This article then, explores Cape slave narratives and post-narratives by focusing on the ways in which the bodies of slave women become the sites on which both physical and discursive violence is enacted.The nature of available texts necessitates a reading strategy that teases out information from the gaps and silences in the narratives in an attempt to reveal the variegated texture of the lived experience of slave women in eighteenth-century South Africa. The article demonstrates how the violent experiences of slave women, and the resultant trauma, complicate a clear-cut distinction between fact and fiction. Through a juxtaposition of court records and a fictional post-narrative, the article uses a literary reading to access women's stories.

This article investigates this question with a study of how the larger context of church practice and dogma influence the reality of a slave-owning society in the district of Stellenbosch during the VOC era. It shows that although a 26few slave individuals were baptised in the Dutch Reformed Church, only a very small number of them became actual members of the Church