IMPERIAL NARRATIVE: Finding God in Africa

Elsa Joubert's latest book, The Hunchback Missionary, is a multidimensional novel that is informed and inspired by the archival history of the Dutch Missionary Church in Cape Town. The novel's central motif is a journey, combining elements of historiography. Its narrative thrust is reminiscent of imperial narratives such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines.

ELSA Joubert's latest book, The Hunchback Missionary, is a multidimensional novel that is informed and inspired by the archival history of the Dutch Missionary Church in Cape Town. The novel's central motif is a journey, combining elements of historiography. Its narrative thrust is reminiscent of imperial narratives such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines.

However, unlike Conrad's Kurtz and Haggard's Curtis, the protagonist narrator in The Hunchback Missionary, Aart Anthonij van der Lingen, is not in search of gold, diamonds or ivory tusks. The treasures he seeks are the "lost souls" of Africa. Lay missionary Van der Lingen, ''deathly pale" and full of doubt, believes he is the "fish from the north" chosen by "the far-off Netherlands God" to minister to the "ironclad people", the dark and "unconverted souls" of Africa.

What begins as an uncertain voyage from the north lands Van der Lingen and his fellow missionaries at the Cape. Their mission is to take God's message "like water in a flask to the thirsty ones of the wilderness". At once they are confronted by the reality of slavery in the Cape. As they trek deeper into the interior, pushing further into the unknown, they are confronted by what Conrad calls the "dehumanising effect of Africa" - its hostile environment and inhabitants.

Besides the extremely hot and cold weather conditions and diseases, the missionaries soon feel the temptations of the flesh and the demand of their sexual needs. One, Dr Van der Kemp, becomes obsessed with the sexually provocative swaying hips, thrusting breasts and sensuous walk of the African women. They drive him to such insane heights of sexual arousal that he spurns local social and religious norms, borrowing large sums of money to buy women and turn them into sexual toys.

While Van der Lingen sees his mission to Africa as a failure, it is a journey of discovery of the self and the other. It helps him realise that "we did not bring God to Africa. God is here, was always here".

Like the structure of the novel, the narrator's life goes full circle. It begins with arrival and ends with departure. The prologue, epilogue and postscript are authenticating documents that ground the narrative in the actual history of the Dutch missionaries in South Africa.

The novel reads like the autobiography told through the personal diary of Van der Lingen, hunchback missionary. The dialogue between the narrative and the authenticating documents, combined with letters and the dating of events, contribute to a historical reading of the book as Joubert takes the reader two centuries back through the Cape Town Church Archives. - Jonathan Ball Publishers