 So welcome to this seminar, which is the first seminar in 2021, which is directly being given by the Center for World Christianity, which supports other centers with an interest in World Christianity. As you've seen, we've advertised each other and that's also the way it should be. We're taking advantage of the COVID situation that we're all online, but I would very much like to continue in the same vein with live seminars that are actually projected into the universe. And then this recording will be stored permanently stored on the SOAS YouTube channel, so I'm going to mail out the precise address for this. It's my great honor to introduce a center member, a fellow of the CWC, Joe Davis, who will be known to all of you who have been in discussions in the past few years. And Joe is also now a research fellow at the Johannesburg University. She may be able to tell you more about this than I'm able to do, but this is certainly very prestigious and also gives her access, of course, to the current discourse that you have in post-apartheid South Africa. Since we have already advanced into the hour and since Joe's paper is of some length, yes, I'm going to pass over the word to her. There will be a PowerPoint, she's in control of the right buttons, so I'm going to pass over the word and the controls to Joe. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Lars. And yeah, it's wonderful to be able to share with you some of the work that I've been busy with in my continued studies of the Rev. T.L. Solga. Thank you so much to everyone who has come to listen. I'm just going to share my screen quickly to say, there we go. Okay, so I've been working on solga studies for the past nearly 20 years, giving away my age now, and always finding new perspectives and information, including sometimes speeches and pamphlets. I'm still looking for the sermons and hymns, though. So if you ever do find them or see mention of them, please alert me immediately. So today's paper concerns my study of solga's biblical hominutics, because I'm really keen to know more about his philosophies and how they work. I am using literary analysis to do that, chiefly by arguing that if we identify solga's tropes, we will be able to read his ideologies, because ideology resides in the sign. And certainly, solga used a lot of signs. This model is deridian in that the sign exists, it argues that the sign exists independently of ideology and can be invested with ideology as per the choice of the chooser. And I hope to answer many questions about solga in this way. So as many of you know, the Rev. Teo solga hailed from the Tulsa people in the eastern Cape of South Africa. And he was ordained in Edinburgh in the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, UPC, at Christmas in 1856 after his decade-long higher degree and theological training in Scotland. And he became a missionary to the Tulsa people in March the next year. And here's just some lingo for us that he's a Tulsa minister. He first taught at Mughali, and then he moved to Tutokha, also spelled Tutokha, where he died in 1871, aged nearly 40 years. And here's a map that shows you where he was in really, he was Mughali. If you can have a look along the coast of my map, you'll see the Inluba or Fish River. And Mughali's up that river in a mess of purple and blue. And then Tutokha is up off the Inluba River, which is the Fish River in Tulsa. Tutokha is, can you see my cursor? That's Tutokha. Sorry, I should have thought of that. Here's Mughali, and here's Tutokha. And so those are the two mission stations that he founded, two or four he founded, the ones that he actually worked in. Thanks for the feedback. And just a quick note of where that is in relation to the Cape Colony. So Tutokha is just outside of the neutral territory, sorry, Mughali is just outside of the neutral territory here, just below where it says Tembu. And here is, underneath the direction vein, northwest, south and east, is where Tutokha is. So he's outside of the Cape Colony for most of his life. He deals with the Cape Colony, but he's not actually ever a subject of the British Empire. And we can debate about that at length another time if you like. People always ask me about the map. Anyway, so, two years into his missionary work in Mughali, on December the 3rd, 1859, Reverend Sorge noted in his journal, This unhappy entry has long turned in my mind. Was it possible that Sorge, that most thorough of wordsmiths, had arrived at church unprepared? What had made him so wretched? Sorge's entry continues that a large group of people from five miles north of the Cape Colony, many unconverted, had unexpectedly attended that four-noon service, and so that the church was crowded to excess, and some could not gain admittance. Were these visitors arguably the most pressing subjects of millenarian mission work, those for whom he had failed to prepare? And if so, how had he fallen short of his task? How did he adapt his sermon for both his expected and unexpected congregants, and which corrective measures did he adopt for his future sermons? Knowing which stories Sorge found useful for conversions and how he presented these to his congregations may reveal many aspects relevant to contemporary religious study of African Christianity and the history of Christianity in Africa. Or at least one tiny part of it. I support Wimbusher's assertion that detailed exegetical treatments of the raw materials of the African experience of this period are in order. Indeed, one ponders constantly, what are the resonances in Sorge's exegetical treatment? The repetitions, the divergences. The study of Sorge's biblical hermeneutics also speaks to contemporary queries on the natures of and relationships between black theology, African Christianity, and liberation theology. I am also intrigued that Sorge's hermeneutics would have informed his contemporary African-American clerks. These theologians queried the forms Christianity would take in the event of black ministers leading African congregations. I am also intrigued that Sorge's hermeneutics would have informed his contemporary African-American clergy, Cremal and Garnet, who pondered how Christianity would function in the 19th century, were it to be realised and not deferred a deferred dream to be. These theologians queried the forms Christianity would take in the event of black ministers leading African congregations, how worship and the place of the Bible within that would be structured, how converts might shape the meanings, what churches would look like, and how African sociologists would be affected. Sorge was the living answer to these questions, and he actually answered them twice over, both from Guaile and Chichurra were built from scratch in very different ways. The most definitive way to understand which scriptures Sorge felt to be the most compelling for his sermons would be to read those prepared discourses. However, these are not currently in the public domain. But Sorge remains a forefather and leader, and his choices have broader implications, and so I could not let's address there. I followed the advice of Sorge's 20th century scholar, the late Donovan Williams, and said to assembling the texts Sorge used when he preached, which may he felt be significant for a number of studies. Sorge's noting of scriptural passages in his letters or reports shows his belief that his remote readers would infer the specific significance he brought to each passage by intertextual illusion. It shows Sorge felt that knowledge was held in common with his globalised Christian community. That should still be true today. Of course, the sermons themselves would have been different to the scriptures around which they were based, as stories wound around and elaborated scriptural passages which Hendricks reminds us so beautifully could be infinite, but this is better than no answers at all. I assembled all Sorge's Sabbath entries in Williams' edited works, which typically gave the date and location of the Sabbath, the scriptural passages used, languages, congregation sizes, amounts taken in collection, and baptisms. I verified Bible chapters and chapter-inverse numbers against Sorge's actual handwritten journal and included scriptures Sorge mentioned in his missionary reports and letters to friends published in the missionary record. I read newspapers for summaries of Sorge's guest sermons, especially when fundraising for bigger buildings. However, while there were summaries for white missionaries who visited the four big towns in the Cape Colony from remote stations, I found none Sorge. However, that doesn't mean he didn't do any. It just means they didn't publish them. However, Sorge's work requires two separate contexts for ministry, the first based at the mission station, sermonizing at the pulpit within the buildings of the church, and the second as missionary actively going out to preach both to prior and potential converts. I then turned to reports sent to the missionary record for accounts of his preaching art of visiting closer communities to preach. Sorge's handwritten journal records the dates of visits he made either alone or accompanied with up to three fellow itinerants and travel attendants, ashamed to say always nameless, and the names of people they have seen. It is in his letters to friends in Scotland and his reports to the MRU PC that he provides the actual detail of those journeys. And in terms of the content, we see Sorge preaching very similar content to that which occurs in the pulpit, but without basing his knowledge in an evident sermon and never recording a scriptural reference. Symbolically, these conversations take place without the over determination of religious artifacts which may be interpreted as being aligned with Western culture, such as the actual church itself, or the books, or the prayers, or the very routine to which Christians in the church services may look to for reassurance. And I argue this shows Christianity we contextualized within the African context. There are two. These are two distinct liturgical practices and have different manifestations, as I shall pursue. But briefly, before I go into talking about those, there are two important influences in Sorbers liturgical practices. Firstly, Sorge's position as a closer man within a closer tradition is in violet. Sorge was raised within this community and culture and was never estranged from closer people. He was absent from South Africa for the best part of a decade, but he was never removed or held apart from the closer community. The discursive techniques he used were not in any way foreign to him. And I think that's really, really important. The second influence is the theological education at the Seminary for Ministers in the UPC at Theological Hall, Queen Street, Edinburgh, if I may infer from the curriculum for 1849, three years before Sorge began his studies. This curriculum was steeped in Scottish Presbyterianism and gave Sorge a broad sweeping and expert understanding of Christian doctrine and history. One of the lecturers, the Reverend John Brown, described it as of the highest possible standard in Scotland. And indeed, it appears an exhaustive curriculum which aimed to empower Ministers to render the mind of the spirit intelligible to others. It was a four-year five-year session course running through August and September for eight weeks to which a student gained entry only after a tough exam, just to get in or was a tough exam. Then two hours of lectures per day were held in the first session and then three. Each year, the course comprised classes on the biblical languages, Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and also theology, biblical hermeneutics, that is the history of biblical interpretation and the history of Christianity, especially the Reformation, as well as classes on the writing of several kinds of discourse from the humble homily in the first year to the ecclesiastical exercise or Scottish critical dissertation in their second year to finally a full sermon. During the other ten months of the year, students were required to present a sermon every three months within their presbytery. This information speaks to the question of the excellence which Saga brought to his work. It is so gratifying to see Reverend Saga's name, it's the twelfth name on the list under McDonald, there he is, T.O. Saga from. They spelt it without the I, T.Y.O. from Crefriria, Missionary in Kaffaland, died 18 August 1871. It is so gratifying to see Reverend Saga's name in 1852 as a first year student of theology and it's, here you can see the list of students of theology, that's the beginning of the list from page 695 and that was from 693, oop, 696. Sorry about that. To learn the names of his professors who taught him and their fields of expertise and here they are, Dr. John Brown, who was the one who said such a good course, James Harper, Reverend Neil McMichael, William Lindsay, who is my personal favorite, he is the father of the bride of William Chalmers who, sorry John Aitken Chalmers, who is Saga's biographer, and his daughter died in childbirth 11 months after leaving his home to go to join John Aitken Chalmers, and I have always just had a huge respect for him, he's an important person as well, and then John E.D. And these are, you know, these are Saga's, the teachers, these are the people who trained him in their fields of expertise. I have not located Saga's academic marks, however he was ordained as a minister and received his license to preach on the 23rd of December, 1856. If he had not passed, they would not have ordained him. Alongside these studies, Saga also took medical classes at the Andersonian University and this is very, very small. At the top of this page, you can see a catalogue of students attending the medical school at the Anderson Institute, and the bottom of the page here, you can see third from the bottom, Saga, T, Negro, Missions, Africa. There he is. Now he studied anatomy and material medical, now called pharmacology, and he was very involved in inoculating people against the smallpox. So a third influence on, hang on, let me stop showing for a bit. A third influence on Saga's biblical hermeneutics is the Moravian, the Moravian ethos. The history of the Moravian church in South Africa contains many keys to the history of Christianity in Tulsa and Gunako communities, commencing in the unlikely early period of 1742, with the arrival of possibly the first ever Moravian missionary, George Schmidt, from Transylvania, where the church was founded in Bavianskluweth, also called Gennadindal. And I have a map of Gennadindal for you. There we go. So LM9, if you can see at the bottom next to Cape Town, you can see LM9, the two turquoise arrows. LM9 is Gennadindal, of Bavianskluweth. Schmidt baptized six converts and educated many others in Dutch before returning to Europe in 1746. I believe that it is he who derived the God named Tipo and others with the Gunako peoples, which were taken up in Tulsa. Tulsa people were also in that congregation, even that far south. I omit a long and deeply fascinating story here in the interests of brevity. The next three Moravian missionaries arrived in the 1790s and established two further stations, Elam, which is that LM103 just down from LM9, and then Enon, LM63, which is up behind Vettelsdorf here. And Mgwali is Su-12. Can you see Su-12 there? So once they get to Elam, Enon, they're right in the heart of being able to preach to Tulsa people very easily. Funded Kemp, their exact contemporary appears not to have known about the Moravian settlements just around the corner. And in 1826, 10 years after the first Glasgow African Missionary Society missionary, and just as the first Wesleyans arrived, Shiloh, which is LM13 and it's right that you can walk to Shiloh from Mgwali in less than a morning, was established in Galakadland. The Moravians were far more settled than the Scottish Presbyterians or the LMS missionaries seem to have known or admitted in their writings. No one has acknowledged their presence, but I submit that their significance is huge. The Moravians alone of all the missionary societies, it seems also published guidance for their missionaries in 1784, firstly and then again in 1840, which guidance seems to me to go here directly with Sorgh's practices of preaching out. Let's just quickly have a look at the Moravian way. I am paraphrasing here a 50 page booklet, which I must say makes for brilliant reading, really. And it basically says, tell the theology of the good news first, then Jesus, then God and then the Holy Spirit. So you preach by wolf and conversation, preach full of Jesus Christ, his love to man, because love for Jesus is the aim of the Moravians. Then you tell a father in the heaven, the son is the emissar giving everlasting life. Those who refuse are going to hell, there's no, there's no, there's no much niceness left there. After Jesus you preach about God, the Father in heaven, then the Holy Ghost. Missionaries must desire the heavens to be saved. They must declare God's greatness, beg them not to do bad things, remind that forgiveness comes and gain hearts. Most important, always gain hearts. Always learn. So these numbers in the corner here, those are the instruction numbers, but the page references are the ones that say pp 17 to 18 at the end of each one. 24, always base the learning in the person of Jesus and prepare for evil spirits, which may become enraged by the advent of good. Choose assistance, train them, they may be more useful as messages and this one is something that Soga employed directly and to very good effect. They also advise that if you learn scripture off by heart, that would be a very good way of keeping the people having access to the scripture. If only a few of the growing people learn to read, the rest will benefit also. And this is true with the study of the Moravian settlement. You can see how the first people who were educated in literacy and learn to read passed that story on and the vestiges of that narrative that run across sort of 180 years. Literally, it's unbelievably fascinating. Remember number seven, also remember we are all sinners and all unworthy of grace and do not be glorious in self or self congratulatory. That doesn't really impact much on the mission work, but it does impact on how we see what has been called Soga's Ignatian doubt. Because if he's actually just remembering to be unworthy and to not be self congratulatory, then he's no longer a victim of doubt. He's in fact, even more ardently Christian than before. And I think that that is important. So, turning to Soga's Discussive Practices, let us start with an assessment of his scriptural passages. This picture that I've got here, this graph that I've got here is back to front. It should be the Old Testament first and then the New Testament, but I put all the New Testament pieces in on the left accidentally. He used a roughly 65-35% split between the New and the Old Testament, favouring in the Old Testament the Psalms, without which there is a clear New Testament bias. Although Soga did omit scriptural references for 20 Sabbaths, so these figures are short by between 50 and 100 sermons. Of those recorded, Soga used unique scriptures for each sermon, aside from thrice, i.e. six sermons, so that book of sermons will be fairly fact when you find it. This chart is colour coded by author and all the grey areas here are Pauline, letters to Corinthians, Thessalonians, Romans, and books which have to do with Paul, Acts and Hebrews. Assessing the dates of entries shows that Soga only made entries between 57 and 63, and then 69 and his death in 71. These are the early years that I'm boiling and at the top. Like Paul, Soga seeks to build a community which will operate to a new culturally distinct set of values in a situation of newness where all are new, in a fairly antagonistic context where faith and love are the guiding principles and which is characterised by its reception of mercy. He says, Once you are not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Soga chooses scriptures about the constitution of those people as multicultural. The many rooms in my father's house to which John refers are for difference within unity. Hebrews 5 verse 4 stresses God's choice in those who follow him which underscores the equality between black and white. Soga highlights in Romans 830 that those whom God predestined he called and those he also justified and those he also glorified. God's prerogative here shows that irrespective of skin colour, all are equal, a fairly radical point to expound for Soga's milieu. Although he did uphold ethnic specificity, for example, using the prayer and hymn written by one of his earliest Christian converts, Itzkana. So not his, but one of the earliest Christian converts. Itzkana had died before Soga was born. Together closer crowds as a unifier of voice. The homeland for this chosen nation is a metaphorical, heavenly country and city which Soga calls Zion and the house of Israel. Let Israel be glad in his maker, let the children of Zion be joyful in their king. But avoids the politically charged and divisive issue of land expropriation and annexation of the Cape Colony, Botswana and of the trans sky, then highly topical with several mentions per edition of the local broadsheets. Soga chooses scriptures on how to be as this community and promotes qualities of peace, love and mercy with this new lifestyle. New behavioural codes around interpersonal relationships in which status is not derived by age, gender or history, but by equality within the experience of the divine. He has scriptures on withstanding discrimination and even persecution. Let me just see if I've got another one for you. There we go. He has scriptures on withstanding persecution and discrimination, parables especially from Matthew like that of the ten versions, the narrow way and gate versus the Broadway and gate foreground the need to remain steadfast in Christian belief and practice. Soga presented scripture on the non hierarchical leadership of the church body, stressing the equality of the congregants with ministers who he perceived as servants to the community, albeit chosen by God and not self appointed and church elders. The one point form sermon given in his journal concerns how to harden one's heart against the word of God. Soga loved to argue by ironic inversion and so again I see this as his signature rye intellectualism. Like Paul, Soga refused a patriarchal authority or role. Church elders could do the work of a missionary, go on long itineraries either with Soga or independently and lead the sunrise sermon and prayer. The only authority in the mission station was God represented by Jesus. The only important person is the individual in his or her relationship with God. The scriptures focused on family relationships as the bedrock of this new community. Families were treated as units of equal entities. He says within six months of starting his ministerial career, Soga noted for the first time the plan of people sitting in a house of God by families was introduced today. And it was so easy, simple and becoming that it is a wonder. The first mission was did not introduce it earlier among the people and that generally in our stations the families are still divided in God's house. Soga notes baptisms of infants naming each child and the parents initially every two to three months with once an eight month break. But soon baptisms occur each month. This reflects an increase in both the population and at the mission station and in the conviction of those congregants. Soga presents scripture around building of actual church buildings, which he undertook three times in 14 years, most arduously, specifically after on the laying of foundation and cornerstones. So this metaphor from Ephesians 219 is deeply apt. Soga preaches from verse 19. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. But verses 20 and 22 continue built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you are also being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. This is one of two sermons given twice, both on the same day the 5th of October 1862. So in June of that year, Soga had also sardonically indicated the need for that new building. But will God indeed dwell with man on earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven contain you, it cannot contain you how much less this house that I have built. That's from 2 Chronicles 618. He notes that the acquisition of a bell for the church at Chityukha was caused for celebration with the congregation singing to call others to church. Psalm 122 verses 69 was given for both the services celebrating the laying the foundation stone of the second church and for his final service at Mughali before leaving for Chityukha in 1867. Whether this was deliberate needs investigation. I predict that this was a key motif in his guest sermons in the Cape Colony. Now Psalm is the book from which Soga takes the single biggest quantity of scriptures but always of praise and worship, not one single lament. Only he ever talks about providing ways to be joyful and rejoice. He also has several scriptures on the nature of Jesus as the true vine or bedrock of the community. The shepherd, the healer, the human. Romans 425 stresses that the whole point of Jesus is the people not himself. Revelations 334 grants Jesus as a person who could knock on the door and come in to eat. Scriptures on Jesus as equivalent to God and on the central tenets of Christianity particularly the resurrection, death and also peace and of course salvation. All inform the individual's choice and direct relationship with God. And Jesus. Several passages describe the Holy Spirit not as an entity but a metaphor either for a higher spiritual consciousness or soul or for binding a community together such as speaking in tongues for example. These chosen scriptures consistently concern achieving safety, peace, love and cement the cohesiveness of this fledgling and fragile community. Persuading, maintaining and nurturing it. Several glaring omissions are notable. Firstly, aside from baptism, the performative aspects of religion are absent. Saga records no services for Christmas or Easter even though he does record the date in his journal and only one burial even though he wrote on this in other places. Saga based his one Jeremiah reading on New Year's morning in 1860 on therefore says the Lord behold I will remove you from the face of the earth. This year you will die because you uttered rebellion against the Lord, which I find so right. Fortunately communication, the communions were sometimes but not frequently observed. There is no angelology aside from once on the resurrection. One scripture is on the fall and the final entry in the journal is on the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Otherwise Satan, the devil and issues of sin are not used. No miracles. He is not miraculous. There's no suffering. No turbulence. No endurance. No scriptures on the Decalogue. No hell. No sin. No fear. Nothing which could present an ontological clash or cognitive dissonance. There is also an emission of hermeneutic strategies associated with African Christianity. I find no accommodation, although Saga always insisted on the importance of respect for the chiefs and members of their broader society irrespective of religious affiliation. Nor did he use indigenization. The philosophical borders of this new Christian community were always drawn as new and distinct possibly because conversion was evidenced performatively by adopting a different behavior. I even feel that Saga did not experience inculturation. His multiculturalism and globalized knowledge bases may infer inculturation through his enjoyment of expanded fields of consciousness, but Saga never lost his culture. Likewise, the scriptures Saga chose avoid syncretic agreements even where these appear useful such as with Robola, Adari and Trousseau combined, polygamy or marriage of widowed women. Saga never exploits congruence between Christian and Pulsar philosophies. He does not use adaptation, and I think he avoided incarnation because of the appearance of numerous prophets within the Pulsar community. Saga used no scriptures which might lead to an ontological difference or cognitive dissonance beside the immediate question of accepting the love of God. There are perfectly no references to black theology as seen in the 19th century African American ministries. No basis of any sermons is influenced by hermetic discussions. There's no leading art, exilic narrative, no discussions of slavery or the special position of Africa within the history of Christianity and within the Bible, which we have seen from the class year curriculum he definitely knew about. There are no passages of escape from bondage, no salvation, no pharaonic metaphors, only redemption which is personal, individual and metaphysical. The direct oppositionality and group solidarity of the African American theologians like Henry Highland Garnett is absent. There is no mention of the eunuch. In several of Saga's letters to the press written under a pseudonym, we see a strident political voice, but these scriptures show Saga more like Frederick Douglass. Bayeta notes that the aspiration of progressive Christians has been that people recognize themselves as belonging to one and the same humanity which God shaped in his own image and which his son died to redeem. Saga seems to have been progressive even 150 years earlier. Yet this is a startling finding because South Africa became leaders in liberation theory, not even a century later. Theology, sorry, liberation theology. The first clear conclusion I can draw between Saga's hermeneutics and the hermeneutics of black theology is that Saga did not seek to relocate his community and started to knew. As for black theologians by entreating congregants to pursue personal freedoms in a promised land. He was already in the promised land and he called it that. Nor did he ever advocate that people rise now and fly to arms as had hermeneutics Dr. Henry Highland Garnett. His was a community establishing itself and going about its business, providing benefits for those who were joined in return for several performed behavioral changes. And ideally a professed conversion to Christianity, but not. It wasn't a law that you had to profess Christianity. You just had to. It was hope they hoped you would. He was another crucial difference was that African Americans achieved only illegal access to the Bible and literacy. Whereas in Africa, the Bible was forcibly inserted into people's lives, churches and schools popped up all over and upheld education and literacy as imperative. That's totally not different from what happened in America. Neither is there any sign of liberation theology with its socialist focus on spiritual risk, shiness and physical poverty and attaining awareness of one's social status or political position as intersectional. That is that one's lot in life is actually the byproduct of a system of structural empowerment and disempowerment, not of predestination or biology. A century later, South Africans did use liberation theology. But in Sorgo's context, while unconverted, also people were increasingly impoverished through colonial displacement. They were not slaves as for the African American context, where people had no rights and no land. In fact, none of the labels for the types of African Christianities with which we currently work appear to apply to Sorgo's work or hermeneutics in any way. Most probably because of his earlyness, according to the scholarship on African Christianity, which is not the same as the standards of Christian mission history, already almost 2000 years after Paul by Sorgo's era, neither early by the standards of African Christianity as David Kingreal's research on African and West African clergy in the 17th, 18th and 19th century shows. And indeed, when one starts to seek Sorgo's hermeneutics within this mission work, a whole new field of itineration studies, or as Sorgo called it, preaching out opens up for an explanation of evangelism in the African context. Itineration is looked down on as the unqualified, spontaneous, self-appointed version of preaching. And our tenorance, our view, is helpful if unqualified but wildly enthusiastic lay preachers, as in the case of Colonel Malan, whose furlough rides through the mission fields of South Africa between the Kai and Bashi rivers, detail exactly this phenomenon. But preaching out signifies something much more for Sorgo. It is a tool of evangelization and casts a decidedly apostolic light on Sorgo's work and mission ethos. Sorgo soon set up a routine of frequent itineration trips, and he soon showed a great enjoyment for them. In every year, almost all year through, he moved in a 10 to 12 mile radius east and north, meeting people and preaching to groups ranging from 25 to 500 souls large. Tuesdays were his days for itinerating in a normal week, but sometimes he would go for weeks at a time, once three months. Sorgo frequently refers to his itinerary experience as an important and normalized aspect of this work, even when it has been neglected for some time my itinerating has been interrupted by the sickness of all my horses. But the elders Dukwana, Festiri and Gaza go out regularly on the Sabbath and meet with the people in the crowds, fix the point for this purpose. There are several advantages to this type of preaching. First, as is evident in this last quote, Sorgo could unite all of the longest standing Christians of several decades standing as his elders in a strong network. And here they are for anyone who would like to take a photograph or just somehow screenshot that. That's a result of many years of careful scholarship collecting these names. Sorgo described these men, even to chiefs as his mouth, hands and legs in the furtherance of his work. This permits an interchangeable center of authority. If for any reason one was unable to work, the work itself could continue further together they could reach more than far more people far more quickly than in the church itself. And thereby extend the influence of our little church by the labels of the native agency brought to bear and statedly on the heathen directly and statedly on the heathen. So he notes that the elders have been enabled throughout the year to continue their work without interruptions. Sorgo does not record the content of the itinerations of his elders, but he records his. Some whole reports are about itinerating on a grand scale. Sorgo has preached on love and mercy, righteousness, temperance and judgment and discusses the color of people, the fall and sin and redemption. And he's chiefly recording the gospel as in the news of salvation from sin and everlasting life and or mortality of the soul through the death of the Son of God, the great mystery of godliness. He has only the Bible as text. But again, Sorgo does not tell the stories of the parables, just the central ethos of Christianity as the Moravians had outlined it should be done. These discourses were essentially dialogistic conversations which became at times negotiations with chiefs. But Sorgo knew the pomp and ceremony around the speech acts in noble situations and was not nonplussed. Rather, he knew when the speech act could be competitive even with the chief and how to use his religious knowledge or to challenge chiefs to answer back, even contradict or answer in a forceful way or deliver comments on the chief's ideas or modes of being. Preaching out also allows Sorgo to record conversations with ordinary people, held either during his sermonizing or occasioned by his travels, which provide opportunities of unfolding the message of life to men who then spiritually as well as physically were in very destitute circumstances indeed. They heard us willingly, he says. The discursive opportunities of these conversations allow people to ask questions or perplex me further and thus enable him to enable them in their knowledge requirements. One woman asks him, servant of God, don't give up speaking to us, though we are deaf. He likes these. Reading the conversations is like watching the movie Mindwalk. The plot is the unfolding of knowledge in conversation. He records them without speech marks, so one reads slowly to see which speaker is the owner of any given utterance. Sogo also records prayers of Christians and he can use itinerary journeys to establish where people are in there being shipped about by the colonial office to extend membership certificates where these are needed. If no one comes to hear him preaching, Sogo can actually go and fetch them. In itinerating, he says, among my countrymen, one requires to assume a degree of courage by at once going personally from hut to hut, tracking out the reluctant inmates, otherwise you would often have to wait long for an audience. It also permits nonverbal communication. Sogo would still give sermons, especially if he stayed overnight, for example, he visited and preached at the native church in PE. And I feel certain that these discourses would also have adopted the call and response patterns he had established with people to ask their questions. I wonder whether these conversations did not also shape and form the sermons Sogo prepared for the church services as well. What arises therefore is a hermeneutic of polyvocality, even polyphony, a community of making meaning together. These sermons were bookish in the sense that they relied on Sogo's extensive expertise to enable him to respond to a broad range of questions from a broad range of knowledge bases with respect for the status of interlocutors, which Sogo was able to do, because uniquely, unfortunately, he was a missionary to his own people. This gave him a confident authority and language which could scarcely hope to achieve in a lifetime. But the sermonizing is bookish without a book. It requires extemporaneous delivery based on the knowledge. It is the execution of that knowledge that Sogo provides, the spoken tradition and persuasion. Felder mentions, our viewpoint depends more on what is heard, and this may be similar to an oral hermeneutic in which the texts were heard more than read. They were engaged in stories that seized and freed the imagination. In seeking to read Sogo's biblical hermeneutics as interpersonal and performative rather than intrapersonal, I am asking us to consider that the idea of interpretation ought to include the idea of discernment, of interpretation as a framing device, of relaying the message, framing and distributing it rather than anything else, choosing an interpretation which will meet the needs of one's audience rather than the sender. I always worry that it is tautological to talk about biblical hermeneutics, seeing as the term hermeneutics refers specifically to the discussions of biblical stories and the reinterpretation in different contexts. Or at the very least that biblical hermeneutics must be the high church of literary analysis. And it is even more tautological to talk of black biblical hermeneutics as if these literary manifestations had no ordinary place in the discussion of the ways in which these interpretations were made. There are other theorists who have mentioned this, I know. But perhaps in this instance, we would need to stretch the potential of the name to incorporate presentation possibilities in the history of using the Bible to create new meanings. Sogo is clearly using a range of influences as well, working with different manifestations of Christianity and knowledges he has to serve his community to the best of his ability. Does this amount to a rejection of dominant Western theological paradigms and an acceptance of African realities and worldview in theological hermeneutics? Or is it a pacification of culture and uncritical acceptance of a foreign methodology? I don't know. I think this show saw his firm commitment to Christianity, his conviction in salvation and redemption. He sticks so closely to poorline messages that he's taking no chances, no risks. He has absolute faith that it will work. This theology shows that his strategy of evangelization in this social transformation is the social transformation. His commitment is to a long-term investment. To base his sermons on these scriptures locates the ideas and knowledge within a context which is stable for the congregants and can be referenced and built on. I think it is still liberation theology, whether with capitals or not, because it is Bayeta's definition which says that theological reflection born of the experience of shared efforts to abolish the current unjust situation and to build a different society which is freer and more human. It is relevant in this way. The end. Now you can hear me. Thank you so much. This was a very, I am trying to find the correct terms for it. As a historian, let me just say before I open the discussion, as a historian, I have to say that I'm in awe of the detailed nature of your research. The maps reminded me of those drawn by my own former supervisor, Gary Tiedemann, who did exactly the same. He traced every single mentioning and then placed them in maps that did not exist. You created your own maps more or less. Please don't die before you ever put this into print. This is really very meticulous research that needs to be followed up and published. So this is, I very much look forward to that stage. The second thing that I want to say is also, it's almost like the interface between social anthropology and history, where you are tracing not just the individual, retracing the steps of our preacher, but actually also tracing the connections that they had with the rest of society and this is fascinating. This is again something which opens up a whole panoply of different ways of looking at socials of the social order at that point, because usually it's of course seen through the lens of the colonizers, where you have the agency on the Dutch or later English, well, not only the church members, but I mean the colonial presence at that time, and then everything else is interpreted through that. This is actually with the agency firmly in the hands of the local. So this is the second point that I wanted to mention. And then the third point is the, I'm not qualified actually for that academically, but your insight into the theological ideas of, well, the Moravian the brothers who go out and they the recollections of the Moravians that I have so this is, this is Janus who at the very beginning goes out and just wants the gospel to be read in the vernacular, in Czech. And then, you know, also in German for the German parts, but he has these ideas that the people need to be involved. There you have him preaching in exercise, exercise that is. Yes, yes, that that's his native tongue so that so he does that and this is the application of the same side spirit. I was going to say, for 400 years later so this is the, this is, if you want to make a chapter out of this parallel then I'd be happy to prove that that's something that I find fascinating. But now I'll be quiet and I'll open up the floor to the discussion. And are you all able to unmute yourselves or do we need to do that. If you are just click on the microphone. Yes, and we are not so many so I don't think we need to raise hands simply you simply raise your voice and then I think the microphone will the camera post which to you. Thank you, please go ahead. Oh, any questions. Sorry. I was sorry. I am muted. I was experimenting but anyway. Hello your hello everybody else. Thank you Joe. So that's enlightening research very in depth, very thorough, etc. My own research. Interestingly, one of my kinds of speciality is on black homo let it the hermeneutics of black homo let it particularly within the Caribbean context. I do focus on the African Americans and I draw reference to the African oral tradition so I was fascinated with your insights in terms of how that was used in terms of the call response elements, etc. So I, that's a major part of my research and positioning call and response as a hermeneutical frame. So, you know that's all I wanted to say so I'd be very interested in looking at your research and exploring your research in more detail. And I think there are references to my own research, which is located within the African Caribbean community within the UK. So I look at the diasporic communities within the UK. So amazing, Carol. I mean, it's so wonderful for me to for me to to speak with someone who also finds this ridiculously fascinating. Oh, gosh, yes. Absolutely at the language. Oh, and how he used the language of the community and he and his own biblical hermeneutics. It can be a model of evangelism. Yes, it can. I really do be so there's a big juncture here. Yeah. So what there's a big just there's 40 years that are vacuumed out of his. Yes. Actually, this was vacuumed out too. Right. Yes. There's more than 40. There's like 200. But as I started to put it back together, so there's the 40 years between when he dies and when the African. Yes, coaches in South Africa are really taking off. And in the middle there, Nat Turner, who is this African American Presbyterian. Yes. All right. I believe that saugas children. Yes, I've written about this before used his techniques as well and the young, the oldest son went on to have these three day long to bangs. Wow. Feasting and dancing. Yes. And that evangelism was a kind of revival revival moment. Yes. Yes. Yes. The second son, his name is John. He didn't go in for it much, but he was more of a bookish lad. Right. Okay. Okay. The three day party like for him books for three days would be a yes. Okay. But yes, I think it's a really, really, I mean, that's where I need to go next. And I also think that so I had connections with the West Indies. Yes, he knew about the African Caribbean situation. Yes. Henry Highland garnet. He was known to so he was ordained in the same church as so he was two years previous to so I think that so I was betrothed to a woman that garnet looked after who was. Oh, a man, a self-manipatized woman. Her name was Stella Vimes. Oh, and he and she were in Jamaica in 1853. All right. So there are really important connections, which are globalised. Right. If we spend them back to Jamaica, we can spend out to India and to China. Yes. Yes. Fascinate. Well, I'd like to connect with you. I think I'll contact Jenny to get your email. I think that would be useful. Well, I think York would agree with that. I think that would be. No, but I'm connected to Cambridge via York. I did a paper for York at Cambridge, but I'm not at this moment in time at Cambridge. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes, likewise. Thank you. Thank you, chair. Yes, thank you. Thank you for your question. I just, I think I'll switch off the recording now. But so, but because we've got the full hour, but we will be continuing until the cows go home. We just see where they can switch it off without actually.