A
study of missionary settlement and the spread of Christianity in southern
Africa during the period 1800 - 1925, including a piece on the role
of missionaries, a list of mission stations, and case studies of individual
mission stations.
This
material was researched and prepared by Franco Frescura to be published
in book form. SAHO has procured the rights to publish this
material on the website.
This project can be found in the places section of the website, as well as in the culture & society section of the site (Religion). Please note: South African History Online, in partnership with Franco Frescura, has produced an online archive of Frescura's work. This archive includes sections on architecture, urbanisation and housing, lectures, tutorials and conference papers, graphic work, South Africa's postal history and a visual archive | link
This
book has its origins in research I was conducting in 1982 in the field
of
the indigenous vernacular architecture of southern
Africa. At that stage I was researching the links between the so-called “civilizing” mission
of white European and North American religious zealots, and the changes
which had begun to become manifest in the local built environment as
early as the 1860s. By the 1920s other, and equally overt, influences
had also begun to emerge. The mines at Kimberley and on the Witwatersrand,
migrant employment in urban areas, the educational curriculae of Missionary
Trade Schools, and the training given on an ad hoc basis by white farmers
to their laborers, were beginning to create a fabric of competing influences
which made it easy for racially-motivated detractors of Black culture
to dismiss the achievements of rural builders as the product of a “civilizing” and “superior” white
presence. It is not within the scope of this book to discuss the merits
or otherwise of such claims. Suffice it to say that the data contained
in this publication went a long way towards exposing many such fallacies.
Originally the book began as a simple typed listing of some 1030 mission
stations established by some 60 missionary societies over a period of
125 years. Its purpose was to show, by means of five maps set at 25-year
intervals, the spreading geographical presence of missionaries over southern
Africa. These have been included in this book and, as will be seen, their
intent was primarily graphic. Their scope was therefore somewhat limited,
as mission stations were merely indicated by means of dots, with no identification
as to their place name or missionary society affiliation.
This
listing was then reproduced by the Department of Architecture, at the
University
of the Witwatersrand, as a small publication which,
much to everyone’s surprise, went to four separate printings and
sold over 600 copies (Frescura 1982). Since that time much additional
information has come to hand, including an unpublished manuscript of
a Gazetteer of mission stations in the Eastern Cape (Skead 1980), as
well as the various accounts provided by travelers into the southern
African hinterland during the nineteenth century. As a result the scope
of the original manuscript has been extended beyond its original scope,
and can now probably be read as a collected account of missionary efforts
in southern Africa at a time when the regions social, economic and political
life was being restructured by colonial forces.
Grateful
thanks are extended to Sue Tilley, Beth Strachan and Anna Cunningham,
of the
Africana Library, University of the Witwatersrand, who were gleeful
partners in seeking out dusty and long-forgotten volumes; Denver Webb,
formerly Historical Curator at the Kaffrarian Museum, King William’s
Town, who discovered the Skead manuscript; and Rosmary Wilkinson, of
Johannesburg, and Cleopatra Mda, of Port Elizabeth, who were responsible
for most of the typing.
Franco Frescura
Durban, November 2003
