Of Revelation and Revolution - Volume 1

Of Revelation and Revolution is at once a highly imaginative, richly detailed history of colonialism, Christianity, and consciousness in South Africa, and a theoretically challenging consideration of the most difficult questions posed by the nature of social experience.

Although primarily concerned with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Of Revelation and Revolution also looks forward to the age of apartheid and beyond.

In this first of two volumes, Jean and John Comaroff explore the early phases of the encounter between British missionaries and the Southern Tswana peoples of the South African frontier. Tracing the social and cultural backgrounds of both parties, they pay particular attention to the rise of European modernity and the colonial impulse, to contemporary British images of the "savage," and to the complex world of the precolonial African interior.

They show how the evangelists' attempts to change the signs and practices of the Southern Tswana produced new forms of consciousness in both colonizer and colonized. The Comaroffs grapple in exciting new ways with issues of power and resistance, agency and intention, that have long vexed historians and anthropologists. They reveal how structures of inequality in the colonial encounter were often fashioned in the absence of conventional, coercive tools of domination, and they address the puzzling question of why some cultural forms were incorporated into the everyday world of the colonized while others were contested or rejected.

In reflecting on "the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization" in South Africa, the Comaroffs provide fresh insight into the dialectics of culture and power that shape all historical processes.