(Exctract from:)A brief history of Methodism in the Cape By Tim Attwell
Cape Town, 6th September 1816
There was an urgency about the tall, athletic twenty eight year old Barnabas Shaw as he heaved the last sacks of seed into the wagon and secured them with the ploughshare, tools and wooden boxes and climbed up beside his wife, Jane Shaw. Twelve oxen ponderously hauled the wagon through the cobbled streets of Cape Town and found the track that led northwards through the grey rhenosterveld. They had bought the oxen, wagon and supplies with funds from the sale of their small property in England. There wasn’t time to wait ten months for a letter requesting funds to reach London and be answered.
They had been at the Cape for five months. The ministry among the soldiers was secure under lay leadership for the time being. Meanwhile, the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, had refused to allow Shaw to work among the slave and indigenous population for fear of offending the slave owners and local Dutch citizenry. Shaw was frustrated, believing that they were vulnerable to exploitation and prey to the vices of the expanding empire. These were the ones he believed ‘wanted him most’ and if he was to be prevented from serving those who lived under the shadow of Table Mountain and the Governor, he would go to those beyond the reach of the Colonial administration, but not the degrading effect of modernity. Conversations with the Rev H Schmelen of the London Missionary Society and a compelling sense of God’s call convinced Jane and Barnabas Shaw that they must go to Namaqualand.
Nciemies, Namaqualand, September 1816
Chief Jaantjie Wildschutt and four chosen companions left Nciemies, their Khoi/Namaqua gathering place, and set off south, paused at the top of the pass through the Kamiesberg and looked back down to the valley below, dotted with matjieshuise and ablaze with its carpet of Spring flowers. The peace could not last. The people had to be prepared for the unscrupulous traders and land hungry trekboers who would inevitably come. How to manage the coming storm of change? The question knotted the Chief’s stomach by day and tormented his sleep at night. ‘We will go to Cape Town and find a teacher,’ he had decided.
For two weeks they marched south, covering three hundred kilometers of arid mountains. Eventually, in the distance they spied a wagon making its painstaking way north of the Olifants River. The chance meeting of Chief Wildschutt and Barnabas Shaw ‘in the middle of nowhere’ set a pattern of partnership between Wesleyan missionaries and leaders of African communities that would be repeated often in coming years. The timing had been perfect and their shared urgency more than coincidental. Both believed God had brought them together.
When the desert bloomed in Namaqualand
Leliefontein, Namaqualand, October 1816
There was a festive atmosphere as Chief Wildschutt and the Elders brought Barnabas and Jane Shaw to the gathering place at Nciemies, later re-named ‘Leliefontein’. Shaw wrote in his journal: ‘We took up our abode in a hut which had neither chimney nor even a door, and in all it was of small dimension.’ Just as well they had no furniture, sat on boxes and slept on the floor.
The Khoi/Namaqua nomadic way of life was not sustainable. A pastoral economy, supplemented by hunting in times of drought, is no match for an encroaching economy based on trade and agriculture. If they did not engage with the new economic order, learn its skills, share its trade and settle the land, the Khoi/Namaqua community would be pushed to the margins, despised as vagrants and persecuted as the San already were.
Within days Shaw began teaching agriculture and soon fast growing crops of lettuce, peas, onions and radishes augmented the traditional diet. Shaw, a capable amateur blacksmith, forged ploughs, expanding the lands under cultivation. The Khoi/Namaqua community quickly applied the lessons. Wheat became a major crop for local use and sale. With wheat came fodder and the traditional stock, hitherto fed by wandering from pasture to pasture, was fattened in the home fields. The manufacture of butter, soap and candles was achieved by the end of 1816. Carpentry, brick making, stonemasonry and construction followed, including the building of a church. By the 1830’s Leliefontein annually produced 2000 bags of wheat and boasted 3000 sheep, 3000 goats, 400 head of cattle and 150 horses, an economic hub in the region.
Meanwhile Barnabas and Jane Shaw, joined in 1817 by the Rev Edward Edwards, ensured that spiritual formation went on. Conversion to faith in Jesus Christ was followed by literacy and the training of school teachers, local preachers and class leaders. These made Leliefontein’s transforming Christian influence possible in communities throughout Namaqualand and the formation of the Namaqualand Mission.
Today the Namaqualand Mission numbers twenty six Societies, two Ministers and a host of deeply committed Local Preachers and Leaders, proud of their heritage and steeped in the traditions of Leliefontein. The Leliefontein history of wholistic mission that, ‘does every possible kind of good to people’s souls as well as to their bodies’, where people discover dignity and reconciled community through faith in Jesus Christ and express that dignity and reconciliation through economic empowerment and development, sets the standard and pattern for all Southern African Methodist Mission.
In June, 1825, two Namaqua preachers, products of Leliefontein, Johannes Jager and Jacob Links, accompanied by a visiting English missionary, William Threlfall, set off to re-establish a mission community at Warmbad, among the Bondleswart people in ‘Great Namaqualand’, now Namibia. The Warmbad mission was an initiative of the London Missionary Society, but the outbreak of war among local tribes had caused it to be abandoned. On reaching Warmbad, the San guides that Jager, Links and Threlfall employed on the way, attacked and killed them while they slept, taking their meagre possessions. Johannes Jager, Jacob Links and William Threlfall are revered as Southern African Methodism’s first martyrs and their memory is cherished to this day among the people of Namaqualand.
But the mission to Great Namaqualand did not fail. Five mission communities, including Warmbad, were established north of the Orange River, with Leliefontein as their base, eventually to be taken over by the Rhenish Mission.
A new people, a new era
Cape Town. 1820
When he arrived back in Cape Town from Leliefontein, the Rev Edward Edwards’s first concerns were the soldiers, the slaves and the Khoisan. Having spent three years with Barnabas and Jane Shaw at Leliefontein, the Wesleyan Missionary Committee in London sent him to Cape Town to take up the ministry that had been impossible, even for the likes of Barnabas Shaw, four years before. His brief was to take charge of the work that Sergeant John Kendrick had started and still flourished through the faithfulness of Kendrick’s men; to build a church and commence work among the slave and Khoisan population.
The majority of Cape Town’s population in 1820 was made up of slaves, a variegated community taken from Indonesia, West and East Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar and Mauritius. Meanwhile, although the resident Khoisan people were not slaves, they were treated by the Dutch as if they were.
These were the victims of empire. For a hundred and fifty years Cape Dutch policy had been to prevent, as far as they could, the preaching of the Gospel to slaves and the Khoisan. Advocacy for them and humanitarian work among them was regarded as treasonous. When the American Declaration of Independence declared it ‘to be self evident that all men are created equal’, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in France, declared the same, and John Wesley wrote to William Wilberforce to encourage him in his campaign to end slavery, the Dutch Governor at the Cape, Ryk Tulbagh, directed that any slave found at the entrance of a church when the congregation left should be flogged. These attitudes had been unchallenged, indeed deferred to, by Lord Charles Somerset, the British Governor at the Cape in 1816. The Wesleyan Missionary Committee and Edward Edwards were about to challenge them.
It would have been uncharacteristic of a Wesleyan Methodist of those days to engage in political activism. Instead Edwards went to the marginalized people themselves and began creating cohesive communities of faith. Dignity for the oppressed was to be found, neither in changing the minds of the oppressors nor challenging oppressive customs and policies, but first in the discovery of grace, in encounter with the Lord who loved them and gave himself for them, in the inner transformation of the new birth and the outer expressions of holiness, of love for one another, of disciplined lives and the arts of co-operation and mutual support. The time would come when oppressive customs and policies would not be sustainable against the emergence of a strong body of people made new. In 1828 the Colonial Administration declared by Ordinance that Hottentots [sic] were “entitled to every privilege to which any other British subjects are entitled.”
Edwards began his services in a hayloft in Plein Street. Services for soldiers were in English; for slaves and Khoisan in Dutch, which Edwards made a point of learning, as had Barnabas Shaw. The hayloft gave way to a disused wine store which, in 1822, was replaced by a newly built and simple church in Barrack Street. The church was opened by the renowned London Missionary Society minister, the Rev Dr. Philip. Other church buildings followed, more ministers arrived: Samuel Broadbent, James Archbell, William Shrewsbury, William Threlfall. Shaw returned from Namaqualand in 1826 and was joined by Robert Snowdall. In 1828 the church was built at Simonstown and is still in use today, its spire a hillside landmark that helped generations of ship’s pilots to find safe passage into the harbour. In 1829 a new church was built in Wynberg. But services and Societies were not limited to churches. Societies were formed in private homes in the most impoverished neighbourhoods, on Robben Island, on the farms at Rondebosch, Diep River, Somerset West, Stellenbosch and as far afield as Caledon, a sixty mile ride on horseback, east across the Hottentots Holland Mountains.
Thanks to laity and ministers like John Kendrick, George Middlemiss, Barnabas Shaw, Edward Edwards and many more, the Wesleyan Methodist Church was ready when life at the Cape was changed forever: 1st August 1834, the freeing of the slaves.
Proclaiming liberty to the captives
Cape Town, Monday, 31st July 1834
Although it was “business as usual” in Cape Town, there really was only one topic of conversation. In August 1833 King William IV of Great Britain had signed into Law an Act of Parliament that declared that slaves throughout the British Empire would be free on the 1st August 1834.
With 39000 slaves in the Cape Colony, a larger group than any other, a mixture of dread and expectancy filled the air. Fears of vengeance were whispered over dinner in wealthy homes, there was talk of widespread vagrancy, homelessness, drunkenness and disorder, prediction of financial ruin for slave owners, complaint about the cumbersome arrangements made for compensation. But also in the air was a sense of wonder, of beginning, of release, of the eventual triumph of right over wrong and deliverance from sin that brings a freshness to the faces of people, both sinners and sinned against, a sense of privilege at being part of a moment when history takes a decisive turn toward the good.
Since the 1770’s, sixty years before, the campaign for the Abolition of Slavery had been gaining ground in Britain, a movement that British Methodists had supported wholeheartedly with petitions to Parliament, pamphlets raising the awareness of the evils of slavery, public meetings addressed by missionaries on home leave, prayers and sermons in class meetings and worship services.
At the Cape there were already many Methodist Societies made up of English immigrants, Slaves and Khoisan. Class meetings were routinely mixed. Services in Dutch and English had been the pattern from the beginning.
As the afternoon of the 31st July 1834 wore into evening people began to move toward Cape Town’s churches. Most were slaves, but there were others who had, like Simeon, prayed, waited and worked for this salvation. Soon the churches were packed and worship was passionate, prayers full of emotion. Barnabas Shaw presided over the service in the Wesleyan Methodist Church and, at the stroke of midnight, with a voice breaking with emotion, cried out: “Slavery is dead!” The Service could not continue as the congregation broke out in loud shouts of thanksgiving and praise to God, newly freed men and women wept with great sobs.
The next day, 1st August 1834, the first day of the Emancipation of the Slaves, was celebrated in the Government Gardens in Cape Town with a huge feast of meat and bread given to thousands of newly freed slave children.
