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Abstract
When evangelical missionaries fanned around the globe during the nineteenth century, they brought with them messages of prophecy and of millenarian expectation. In their eagerness to evangelize the world, they spread these messages to indigenous societies but did not have the resources to control how these messages were interpreted or used by those to whom they preached. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the influence that the messages brought by evangelical missionaries had on innovative religious movements particularly among the Xhosa on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony and among the Maori in New Zealand.
This thesis examines the sources of missionary messages, the transmission of those messages, and the effects that they had on indigenous people. It makes two main contributions to the study of innovative religions in the wake of European expansion. First, it looks closely at the process of communication of Christian beliefs by missionaries and at the breakdown in that process, which permitted independent interpretation. In this effort, the perspectives and behaviors of both the missionaries and the indigenous people are considered. Second, it makes comparisons throughout between two contexts: the eastern Cape frontier and New Zealand. In showing the similarities between these two cases, the argument is made that missionary influence was one of the primary reasons that the religious aspects of indigenous resistance to European colonization took such similar forms in South Africa and New Zealand.
