Daswa: Witchcraft vs Faith

Benedict Daswa (16 June 1946-2 February 1990) was a South African school teacher and principal. He and his family belonged to a tribe called Lemba tribe in rural Venda, which follows many Jewish customs.

At the age of 17 he converted to Catholicism after being introduced to the faith when he visited a friend in Johannesburg. After taking up the faith he decided to teach Catholicism to young members of his community.

Thunderstorms and lightning struck the area of his tribe in November 1989 going on to January 1990, causing a group of local community leaders to think that the lightning occurred because of magic. The leaders collected R5 from all community members to pay for a “sangoma” (a traditional healer) who would find the “witch” responsible for the thunder and lightning storms. Daswa believed that the storms were a natural phenomena and said that a traditional healer constituted witchcraft and this went against his faith and beliefs. He, thus, refused to pay the money for the traditional healer.

Members of the community were offended by his decision. On the evening of February 2, 1990, Daswa was driving home alone after taking his sister-in-law and her son to the doctor. He came across tree logs that blocked the road. Daswa got out of the car to investigate when a mob of people came up to him and started to beat and stone him. He ran away but was soon trapped, his final words were “God, into your hands, receive my spirit” before he was hit over the head with a “knobkerrie”.

After his death, the Catholic Church viewed him as a martyr for his faith and his martyrdom was confirmed in 2015 and on September, 13, 2015 he was beatified in Limpopo. He is now known as Blessed Benedict Daswa in the Catholic Church.

Further Reading:

Benedict Daswa Archive

http://www.scross.co.za/category/benedict-daswa/

Benedict Daswa – A Saint for South Africa

http://benedictdaswa.org.za/

Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer, (27 April 1820 - 8 December 1903), is best known for his theory on Social Darwinism, although he is also known for his Synthetic Philosophy and his ideas regarding Progress or the Law of Evolution. Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian Era and is well known for coining the term, "survival of the fittest" in Principles of Biology (1864). While Spencer worked within a wide array of disciplines, and is associated with many theories, I will be focusing  solely on his theory of Social Darwinism.

Social Darwinism is a social theory that applies the laws of survival to a society, which is essentially the concept of adaptability and competition within a social context, and is used to explain the social struggle evident in society for existence. The idea of competition within a society rests on the basis that there is competition within an economic and political sense, as these two fields being integral in the progression of humanity. Essentially, Social Darwinism is used to describe social progress or evolution.

Spencer did not however, simply appropriate Darwin's biological ideas of progress or survival, (Natural Selection), but rather incorporated it into his preexisting synthetic philosophical system. Spencer's evolutionary ideas are based on Lamark's idea that organs are developed or diminished depending on use and disuse. this evolutionary mechanism is necessary to explain the social development of society, and more broadly, humanity. Spencer's idea regarding social evolution has direction and an endpoint and once it reaches an apex, it will achieve a final state of equilibrium. In this sense, evolution means progress, improvement, and eventually the perfection of the social organism, in this case being society.      

Within the coming weeks I will also try and provide more information on the influence that Herbert Spencer had on other academics, focusing specifically on Olive Schreiner and her literary work.

Follow these links for more information on Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer. Another person of interest is Jean-Baptiste Lamark, who Spencer based his evolutionary ideas on. A link providing information on Lamark is also made available here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Lamarck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer#Social_Darwinism

https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociology-textbook/sociology-1/the-history-of-sociology-23/spencer-and-social-darwinism-149-3119/

Gustav Fritsch: Travel writing and portrait photography in South Africa

Gustav Theodor Fritsch (5 March 1838 - 12 June 1927) was a German anatomist, anthropologist, traveler and physiologist from Cottbus. Fritsch studied natural science and medicine in Berlin, Breslou and Heidelberg and later became an associate professor of physiology at the University of Berlin, He was later appointed the head of the histological department at the physiological institute of the University of Berlin.

While being well known for his work with neuropsychiatrist Eduard Hitzig (1839 -1907), involving the localisation of the motor areas of the brain, he also did extensive ethnographical research in Southern Africa (1863-1866). His travel writing and portrait photography, and how they are presented, is interesting as his methodology shifts from ethnographic-cultural to anthropological-physical. This change in methodology causes his portraits to shift in meaning as well. This shift in portraiture meaning can also be seen as moving from the "honorific" to the "repressive" representation of the focus of his photographs, with the focus of photographs being the indigenous inhabitants of Southern Africa.

Fritsch's portrait photographs of, "Natives of South Africa", were taken between 1863 and 1866 and was published  in reconstituted form in 1872. His initial portraits and travel narrative were "honorific" in nature and their open-ended ethnographic emphasis related to an early racial liberalism. His portrait photography and narrative writing, shifted to the "repressive", emphasising the physical features which would constitute the 'racial types' in Southern Africa. The shift in the meaning and representation in his work is quite sudden, moving from cultural to physical within the span of a decade.

The reason for the sudden change in his approach to documenting the indigenous inhabitants of Southern Africa lies within the context of his academic pursuits and the newly established
Berlin  anthropological community within which he finds himself. More specifically, it is the integration within a newly institutionalised Germany, and particularly within the Berlin anthropological community, that his movement towards a new methodology within this intellectual context, causes him to move from an ethnographic-cultural to an anthropological-physical methodology.          

For further reading on Gustav Fritsch, his travel writing and portrait photographs of the individuals in his, "Natives of South Africa", the following link is quite helpful:                                                           http://reference.sabinet.co.za/webx/access/journal_archive/02590190/670.pdf