RAY E. PHILLIPS

A wedding is being conducted in one of the Native districts in the country. Both Christians and non-Christians are in attendance. At one side of the kraal the heathen folk are gathered. The men are dancing the tribal dance with hand-clapping, singing, shouting and stamping of feet. The beer-pots supply exhaustless energy. At the other side of the kraal are gathered the Christian people. They sit quietly on chairs which have been provided for them. Occassionally they feel the need to respond to the general spirit of rejoicing. Their leader announces a number; they open their hymn books, stand up, and sing one of the famous old hymns of the Church. Then they sit. Among the spectators are a number of children,---sons and daughters of the Christian people who are singing the hymns. We wonder how this scene impresses them. Which activity appeals to them as more attractive---that of the heathen with their movement, loud shouting and stamping, or the quiet singing of their parents. We see the wistful look of the children as thery gather round the heathen dancers, and we realise that were we in their place, we, too, would find the joyous abandon of the heathen much more attractive than the quiet, unostentatious praise-singing of their parents. For their parents who knew the heathen life in all its implications, the joyous songs of praise are enough: the church service is soul-filling. To their children who knew not the fearsome side of tribal, heathen life, much of heathenism appears attractive. Reflected on the faces of these children is part of the answer to the question: Why Social activities for the Bantu? The provision of wholesome, leisure-time activities in the place of the heathen ones; making it possible for our Native people to develop healthily a threefold life, physical, mental and spiritual, instead of one or two. It is a recognitionof the legitimate place which social activities occupy in any Christian society, and should occupy in this new social order of the Bantu. . . . Indications of the direction in which the hunger of Bantu young folks for social expression is looking for satisfaction, and will increasingly find it, are to be seen everywhere: the shuffling, jazz dance in the hot, ill-ventilated halls; the all-night concert; the increase in liquor drinking; the swarms of illegitimate children in slums and locations; the hot-mouthed agitator exciting to revolt; the amalaita gangs; the petty thieves and criminals flooding into the reformatories and goals. Surely there is a broad and needy field here for serious investigation and experiment---seeking ways and means of assisting the Bantu people to occupy their leisure time in activities which are clean, wholesome, and character building. This is not to belittle the work of the evangelistic missionary. His work is absolutely fundamental. It is rather a plea to supplement his work of spiritual regeneration by capturing the rest of the man for Christ, the physical and social being as well as the spiritual. Missionary societies and Welfare bodies must increasingly seek and set aside specially trained men and women for this difficult and particularly challenging department of work.

-Ray E. Phillips, “Social Work in South Africa ”, in Christianity and the Natives of South Africa , Compiled and edited by James Dexter Taylor, Lovedale Press, 1928.