A nexus of lives: how a heretical bishop contributed to our knowledge of South Africa's past

Abstract

This article sketches a series of events that link the lives of contrasting personalities. It leads from a Cambridge academic theologian to a German philologist who recorded the lives and beliefs of nineteenth-century San people, and then on to the present-day, post-apartheid South African national coat of arms. Along the way, events, some momentous, some apparently trivial, brought these two men together and situated them in a network of conflicting interests and the people who worked to realize those interests.

To cite this article: Lewis-Williams, J.D. 2008. A nexus of lives: how a heretical bishop contributed to our knowledge of South Africa's past. Southern African Humanities 20: 463-75.