AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | The Politics of Mythology: The Genealogy of Philip Myth |
| Author: | Bank, Andrew |
| Year: | 1999 |
| Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
| Volume: | 25 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Period: | September |
| Pages: | 461-477 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | missions biographies (form) Ethnic and Race Relations History and Exploration colonialism Religion and Witchcraft |
| About person: | John Philip (1775-1851) |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637682 |
| Abstract: | Using Leonard Thompson's contextual approach to the study of the political mythology of apartheid, this article is concerned with the changing ideological and political contexts in South Africa within which the figure of the missionary John Philip, who arrived at the Cape as superintendent of the London Missionary Society in 1819, was used to mobilize meaning from the early nineteenth through to the late twentieth century. The roots of the Philip myth lie in the ideological and political struggles between Cape Colony liberals, amongst whom John Philip himself was a leading figure, and their enemies, primarily the Cape settlers. The myth of the missionary leader John Philip as a meddling outsider and disrupter of race relations became deeply entrenched in the imagination of white South Africa. The invention of the Philip myth by the historian G.M. Theal was part of the politics of colonial nationalism, nascent Afrikaner nationalism and an emergent Social Darwinism in the 1880s. The myth was entrenched by George Cory in his 'The Rise of South Africa' (1913) before being absorbed into the popular mythology of apartheid in a context of growing tensions between church and State. Notes, ref., sum. |
