Sexual Misconduct and Church Power on Scottish Mission Stations in Xhosaland,South Africa,in the 1840s

Tensions over the control of improper sexuality were a key concern of African converts and Scottish missionaries in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the first part of the nineteenth century. Missionary preoccupations with sexual behaviour meant that sexual acts became key sites for the negotiation of status and identity. Reading the case of Jan Beck, which is represented in unusually rich detail in the mission archive, allows us to see how converts used European understandings of sexual morality to gain access to mission resources as well as to exclude other converts from them. In the process, male converts were mediating between Xhosa and missionary evangelical sexual mores and identities. Their ability to do so reveals both the power of local figures to influence colonial outcomes, and the relative fragility of missionary authority in these contexts.