ardinar comes to the conclusion that, "At present, the reigning king absorbs all their praises, and his is, in fact, their only idol"(179).Francis Owen, a European missionary, arrived in Natal in 1837 in response to a call for missionaries by Captain Gardiner. Owen was trained to preach to middle-class English congregations and treated his Zulu hearers as though they were Englishmen. He gives no evidence of adapting his message to his subjects and attempts to make up for the Zulu people's lack of Biblical knowledge and Christian education by giving endless details that survey Biblical history and Christian theology. Upon arrival in Zululand he made the following statement: "Dingane then asked how old I was. . . He then called for an old print he had of the kings of England. . . he then asked me if God was amongst these kings. . . The Indoonas asked me if I had seen God. . ."(Cory 39). From this comment it seems that Owen believes that Dingane and his chiefs thought of God as an ancestor and, despite the teachings of Gardiner and other missionaries to the contrary, found it difficult to conceive of God in non-cultural terms. From another conversation Owen had with Dingane, it becomes clear that the Zulu story of the origin of death was not a story about God. "They had no objection to God's word, but they did not believe in the resurrection"(Hexham 114). When Owen tried to explain his evangelical understanding of Jesus Christ rising from the dead to Dingane, he encountered a host of questions about the death of God. "Dingane asked me how many days Jesus Christ had been dead. If only three days (said he), it is very likely that he was no dead in reality but only supposed to be so!"(115). From these observations, Owen felt that the concept of resurrection from dead was new to the Zulu people. "These questions show quite clearly that the concepts of an undying Supreme Being was foreign to Zulu thought because none of Dingane's c...
