Changing the settler colonial subject: Lutherans among the Bafokeng and Sioux

In many contexts Lutheranism has been deeply entangled with settler colonial efforts to appropriate Indigenous lands for white settlers within an extractivist capitalist economy while seeking to eliminate the Indigenous population. However, there are notable exceptions to this dominant arrangement of Lutheranism and white settler colonialism that involves important Indigenous agency within a colonial order. This paper contrasts such different relationships between Lutheran churches, white settler colonialism, and Indigenous populations by describing the situation of the Southern African ELCSA church and the North American ELCA. Specifically, this paper compares the relationship of the ELCSA and the Bafokeng in the North West Province with that of the ELCA and Indigenous peoples in North Dakota. The paper is based on existing discussions and analyses in Indigenous, church, and mission histories as well as on field research in the extractive zones of the South African Platinum Belt and the North Dakota Oil Patch.

The paper supports the overarching argument for a synergetic relationship that often exists between white settler colonialism and European-originated settler Christianity. The North West Province was settled by Calvinist Afrikaner Boers whose reading of divine providence, covenantal theology, and the biblical Exodus religiously facilitated their violent conquest of Setwana lands and their settlement thereon. The Lutheran churches of North Dakota provide another example of ways in which Amer-European Christianity has shaped and been shaped by settler colonialism. However, the case of black South African Lutheran churches in the North West Province does demonstrate that Indigenous subjects such as the Bafokeng were able to forge a relationship with Christian faith in a settler colonial context that helped them resist and challenge the dependence and subjugation which this order forced upon them. 

From the 1840s on the lands in what is now the North West Province of South Africa were increasingly invaded and encroached upon by white Afrikaner settlers. These settlers eventually established the Boer settler colonies of Oranje Vrijstaat and Transvaal. As farmers, prospecters, and speculants, the Afrikaner settlers quickly claimed vast tracks of Batswana Indigenous lands. The Afrikaner Boers “extracted” not only land for farming or other forms of commodification; they also raided Indigenous communities and enslaved their children.

Among the Indigenous communities dispossessed of their ancestral lands by Afrikaner settlers were the Bafokeng people of Phokeng, to whom these lands were essential to their crop and cattle farming economy. However, by employing white missionaries as intermediaries, the Bafokeng under the leadership of khosi Mogatle were able to buy much of their land back from the settlers.

It is important to recognize that the Bafokeng invited the missionaries as they were negotiating their position amidst the racialized systems of exclusion and subjugation which white settler colonialism introduced. Mogatle was initially solicited in the mid 1840s by the London Mission Society’s David Livingstone to allow missionaries to work among the Bafokeng. However, it was not until the mid-1860s that the khosi invited the Hermannburg Mission to send a missionary, Christoph Penzhorn, who was only accepted after he visited Phokeng in 1866. (Mbenga & Manson, 2010). By all accounts, Mogatle’s primary motivation was for the missionaries to provide a modern education for his people that would enable them to succeed in the changing social, economic, and political order. The choice for the German Lutheran missionaries was guided by white Afrikaner opposition to missionaries from the London Missionary Society, who opposed the Afrikaner practice of slavery, and the Bafokeng’s rejection of Dutch Reformed missionaries associated with the Boers. The agricultural background and emphasis of the Hermannsburger missions also created synergy with the interests and economy of the Bafokeng.

The arrival of the missionaries also provided the Bafokeng with the opportunity to acquire the title to their own lands in the settler political economy. As black Indigenous people were excluded from holding legal title to land, Penzhorn acquired land through purchase for a mission station and for the Bafokeng. The Bafokeng raised the majority of the purchase price while Penzhorn signed as their trustee. Using the same model, the Bafokeng continued to purchase lands for themselves, thus reacquiring much of their ancestral lands within the settler capitalist order.     

The Bafokeng thus secured a land base for their continued existence as farmers that largely protected them from being enlisted as impoverished black migrant labor that formed the basis of the extractivist white settler economy before and during South Africa’s apartheid era. More recently, the discovery of platinum deposits in the area, including upon Bafokeng lands, enabled the tribe to profit from mineral extraction through ownership rather than as menial labor in the global extractive industry. (Manson & Mbenga, 2003) The cooperation between the Bafokeng and the missionaries also cemented a close association between the black Lutheran church begun by the Hermannsburger Mission Society and the tribe and its leadership.

While the emphasis in the paper is on the situation of the Bafokeng and the ELCSA within South Africa, it briefly contrasts this black Indigenous subject position within the South African colonial order with that of ELCA white settler churches in the extractive zone of Western North Dakota.

In present day North Dakota Lutherans were not involved in early missions among the Indigenous peoples. Instead, the Indigenous communities of this land were missionized by Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Congregationalist (UCC) missionaries. Lutheranism only arrived with later European settlers, and was and is almost exclusively present among the Amer-European settler community. This very different subject position in the settler colonial order was demonstrated in the ELCA’s churchwide discussions about the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and the Standing Rock’s Sioux protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline of 2016. While individual Lutheran congregations, church members and pastors supported the repudiation of this doctrine and protested the pipeline – as did the churchwide ELCA – locally the discussion was dominated by settler colonial perspectives and extractivist interests. Theologically these were articulated in letters and synod motions as indigenizing tropes of land and creation care, and as a colonially disinterested Christology that favored the existing colonial order.