“Desperate Fighting at the Cape”: The Salvation Army's Arrival and Earliest Work in Late‐Victorian Cape Town

Many scholars writing on colonial themes have associated the early Salvation Army with imperialism and related ideologies. Historians of Victorian Cape Town have been no exception. Their research has essentially identified the organisation with the imperial concerns of the city and its dominant middle‐class culture. While there is some truth to this assessment, especially after the Army adopted an extensive social scheme in 1890, the earliest efforts of Salvationists at the Cape were often defined by very different objectives. The military‐clad Salvationists arriving in Cape Town in 1883 owed something to a colonial age, but their sensational methods of evangelism quickly angered the local authorities. Despite sharing a bourgeois interest in temperance, the Army's working‐class followers also received little support from the middle classes. Animated by a revivalism that violated conventional notions of religion, gender, and race, its pioneers in South Africa possessed few ties to imperialism or middle‐class ideology.