A Respectable Age

This article sketches the contested history of Black respectability in South Africa from the early part of the nineteenth century until the post-1994 dispensation. It argues that the assumption by numbers of, in particular, mission converts of the outward trappings of respectable Christian life was a form of resistance to colonial rule which was at least as threatening to colonial order as armed incursion. Further, it claims that the exclusion of the respectable Black middle class from any position of power, or influence, under segregationist and, above all, apartheid governments drove this group into an opposition which was at once foreign to the nature of the amaRespectables and, equally, particularly dangerous to the regime.