Naissance du Mozambique: Résistance et révoltes anticoloniales, 1854-1918 by René PélissierReview by: Phyllis M. MartinThe American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 5 (Dec., 1985), pp. 1249-1250Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1859791 .

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Africa 1249

first postcolonial one gathered to reassess a part of the colonial experience without the defensiveness that has long characterized metropolitan historical accounts. This is undoubtedly a result of the efforts of Jean Stengers, who has long championed a real- istic approach to Belgian colonization.

The general topic of the essays surmounts previ- ous reluctance by concentrating on the Second World War, a period on which most Belgians look back with considerable pride. Despite the fall of the mother country to the Nazis, the Congo fought on, providing the Allies with vital raw materials, includ- ing the uranium that went into the first atomic bombs. Given this record, scholars could also ap- proach wartime issues that show Belgian rule in a less favorable light.

This new outlook is best represented by the first essay, in which Leon de St. Moulin shows that the war marked a continuation of unfavorable demo- graphic trends ahnong the colonial population. Through a systematic examination of colonial statis- tics, de St. Moulin shows that the positive vital rates, which we now take to be characteristic of the entire continent, did not appear until after the war. By the same token, Jean-Claude Willame documents the subordination of the Zairian work force to Allied demands for war production. In local studies of Stanleyville (Kisangani) and Elisabethville (Lum- bumbashi), Benoit Verhaegen and Jean-Luc Vellut outline regional variants of the urban experience, showing that the inhabitants of one city were cut off from their rural cousins while others exploded with refugees from the war effort. Similarly, Gustaaf Hulstaert portrays the devastating consequences of the revival of rubber collection in Equateur Prov- ince.

Other essays reveal previously unexplored themes in the history of Belgians in Africa through biography and autobiography. Gaetan Feltz exam- ines the contradictory role played by one of the most complex colonial personalities, Jean Felix de Hemptinne, the archbishop of Katanga, who at- tacked the war effort as undermining the welfare of Africans. Frans Bontinck describes the enormous strains put on Belgian Catholic missionaries in the capital city, and with considerable charm Jacques Vanderlinden, the son of a colonial manager, de- scribes the war from the point of view of a child.

Individually, none of the essays offers a definitive treatment of any aspect of the war. Nonetheless, the collection opens the way to a broader synthesis.

BRUCE FETTER

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

RENt PtLISSIER. Naissance du Mozambique: Resistance et revoltes anticoloniales, 1854-1918. Orgeval: Pelissier. 1984. Pp. 393; 407-883.

This book about the Portuguese conquest of Mozambique concentrates on "getting the facts straight." Rene Pelissier sets the character of his study in the introduction: "The reader will find neither system nor dogma, which can well become outmoded before the book is in print. To make up for this, the reader will find a quite substantial body of facts that each can interpret as he wants, for we do not claim that our analysis is better than others" (p. 12). Indeed, an enormous number of facts are contained in this work, which is divided into two volumes for convenience of publication rather than for conceptual reasons. Even the most ardent stu- dent of Portuguese colonialism or of the early years of Mozambican colonial history will hardly want to read the volumes from cover to cover. Yet they are an indispensable reference for understanding the various strands that made up Portuguese imperial policy and the actions of administrators and gener- als on the spot in Southeast Africa and for the various military campaigns over a sixty-year period in the regions that became the colony of Mozam- bique.

The book is divided into four sections. The first two deal with the context of conquest. First, the nature of the Portuguese presence in Southeast Africa in relation to African, Indian Ocean, and rival European powers in the 1850s is discussed. This is followed by a review of the political and economic situation in the metropole that shaped policy in Africa. Pelissier flirts with some of the ideas of the "noneconomic" school of Portuguese imperial history and with the more recent trend to view imperialism as an outgrowth of Portugal's economic weakness in relation to the other colonial powers of Western Europe. But he does not take sides, since this is not the point of his study. The main section, entitled "The Conquest," then follows. The military campaigns and African responses are described for the three major regions of the colony: the north, the Zambezi Valley, and the south. The section on the First World War starts with a chapter on the well- known Barue campaign, where Pelissier adds some details to the accounts by Allen Isaacman and Ter- ence Ranger, and continues with a chapter on the campaign against the Germans, who invaded the northern part of the colony from German East Africa.

Those expecting a companion work to Pelissier's massive two-volume study of Portuguese conquest and African resistance in Angola may be disap- pointed, for this latest work is narrower in scope, though more detailed on the subjects it does cover. Naissance du Mozambique is primarily a military his- tory, both from the Portuguese and from the Afri- can side. The multifaceted sweep of African nation- alism contained in the volumes on Angola is not evident in the Mozambican study, which, further-

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1250 Reviews of Books

more, concentrates more on the Portuguese side of the story. Perhaps this was wise, since, as Pelissier explains, he was unable to visit Mozambique and to work in the archives there. An extensive body of literature on African responses to colonial rule in Mozambique already exists, but the perspective of this book and its coverage of the whole country complements to some extent the studies of Isaac- man, Ranger, Leroy Vail, Landeg White, Jeanne Penvenne, and others. What Pelissier sets out to do, he does very well.

Not least important in these volumes is the bibli- ography and the tables. The annotated bibliography of some nine hundred fifty titles is a mine of information. This is also true of the numerous charts and tables that quantify the violence of Por- tuguese colonialism in terms of military campaigns and economic and human costs. Of the many in- triguing details, one of particular interest is that in the sixty years covered in these books, excluding World War I, Portugal annually sent to Mozam- bique the same number of troops as were committed to the war against Frelimo in 1983.

PHYLLIS M. MARTIN

Indiana University

J. ALTON TEMPLIN. Ideology on a Frontier: The Theolog- ical Foundation of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1652-1910. (Contributions in Intercultural and Comparative Studies, number 11.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 1984. Pp. xiii, 360. $35.00.

South African historians have long assumed that the Afrikaners, long isolated from modernizing trends in Europe, elaborated seventeenth-century Calvin- ism into a modern ideology of national exclusiveness and racial domination. Few, however, have taken the trouble to argue this view systematically. To do so, one would have to distinguish three phases in the alleged role of Calvinism: (1) in preserving the racial and cultural identity of the primitive "trekboer" in the eighteenth century, (2) in animating Afrikaner nationalism in the nineteenth century, and (3) in shaping the ideology of apartheid in the twentieth. J. Alton Templin attempts to document the role of religion in the first two phases. His study is based on vast research in primary sources and secondary works, largely written in Afrikaans and Dutch and rarely read by non-Afrikaners. His is probably the most detailed argument in English for the social role of Afrikaner religion before the unification of South Africa in 1910.

Templin evidently did much of his research in the 1960s, when he published an article on the subject. Although his book refers to a few recent authors in its bibliography and footnotes, there is little evi- dence that he has kept abreast with the major historiographical developments of the last fifteen

years. One unsettling result is that he is misin- formed on the African side of white-black conflict, a failing accompanied by his use of terms like "Kaffir War" (p. 43), "tribal background" (p. xii), and "Bantu" (used to denote Africans throughout), which today give great offense.

Templin's isolation from recent historiography also leads him into serious problems of interpreta- tion. His views fit squarely into what Martin Legas- sick identified in 1970 as the "frontier tradition" in South African historiography: one that interprets racial oppression in South Africa as a result of the isolation, ignorance, and embattled history of the Afrikaner. Against this interpretation Legassick ar- gued for a more "materialist" view that would shift responsibility from religion to economics, from the frontier to the mines and industry, from the Afrikaners to the English. Since 1970 numerous revisionist scholars have developed the ideas sketched by Legassick. Templin simply bypasses this scholarship. He also downplays Afrikaners of the long-settled Cape Colony in favor of those of the interior republics. This leads him to slight the highly influential Cape Dutch Reformed Church, which had an energetic clergy, close contacts with Euro- pean theology, and much influence on the Afri- kaner people. This in turn permits his overemphasis on the popular, home-grown nature of Afrikaner religious ideas. The frontier emphasis also gives rise to his view that apartheid is "the logical outcome" of the conflictive history of the Afrikaner and that (modern) "economic necessities ... are opposed to this type of barrier" (pp. 294-95). Both propositions may be true, but the host of published counterargu- ments cannot simply be ignored.

More seriously still, Templin takes little note of the most recent scholarship on his central queston, the relationship between Calvinism and Afrikaner nationalist ideology. For example, the highly rele- vant works of Dunbar Moodie and Irving Hexham are noted in Templin's bibliography, but they are never engaged. To be fair, Templin cannot be blamed for not responding to three very recent articles by Andre du Toit. Du Toit has meticulously demonstrated that historians of Templin's persua- sion misconstrue the vaguely providential language of frontierspeople as proof that they viewed them- selves as the elect of God. Templin does little to anticipate such an attack. His method is simply to lard his narrative with numerous quotations with religious content. He does not play with alternative interpretations, distinguish themes, or set ideas in opposition to one another. Thus, most of his evi- dence could be used to support contradictory con- clusions in a debate that has now become many- sided, and almost none of it is proof against the radical skepticism of someone like du Toit. In sum, Templin has compiled a mass of useful evidence; he

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