This work has its origins in doctoral research I was conducting in 1982 in the field of the indigenous vernacular architecture of southern Africa. At that stage I was searching for the links, if any, that might have existed 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, the introduction of industrial building materials into the rural economy, 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 “technically superior” white presence.
Originally this work began as a simple hand-written 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 are my working notes upon which a listing was based and were originally produced by a crude cut-and-stick method of collation that preceded the use of personal computers.
During the process of photocopying, the...
