The Farmerfield Mission: A Christian Community in South Africa, 1838-2008

by Fiona Vernal

Overview

The Farmerfield Mission explores the history of a residential Christian community in South Africa established for Africans in 1838 by Methodist missionaries, destroyed in 1962 by the apartheid government when it was zoned as an exclusive area for white occupation, and returned to the descendants of the community under South Africa's land reform program in 1999.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199996308
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/29/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Fiona Vernal is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Prologue
Introduction
Part One
Chapter One: Genealogies: The Evangelical Revival and Pioneer Mission Work in the Cape Colony, 1799-1834
Chapter Two: Pioneer Models of Methodist Missionary Enterprise: The Chain of Stations
Chapter Three: Bringing the Chain of Missions Back to the Eastern Cape: A Novel Turn in Methodist Missions
Part Two
Chapter Four: ''A Select Class of Natives:'' Economic and Social Visions of the First Fifty Years of Farmerfield
Chapter Five: ''Incipient Civilization,'' and ''Nominal Christianity:'' Calibrating African Christianity at Farmerfield
Chapter Six: The Review of 1884: Farmerfield at a Crossroad
Part Three
Chapter Seven: Revamping the Mission: Reincarnations of Farmerfield, 1884-1962, 313
Chapter Eight: Becoming a Black Spot: The Removal of 1962
Chapter Nine: Reclaiming and Resettling Farmerfield
Conclusion
Notes
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This case study of the Farmerfield Mission deepens our understanding of the complex forces that belonged with nineteenth century missions and colonial rule in South Africa. Fiona Vernal has shown how it was not only mission policy and colonial politics that defined the transmission and local appropriation of Christianity but also African responses and agency. The shifts and prevarications of mission policy were as much a response to colonial and apartheid measures as they were to African realities. It is, indeed, the achievement of the book that it provides a persuasive rationale for the emergence of the African voice in historical reconstruction and interpretation, often against the odds. The book should command the attention of students of the subject."—Lamin Sanneh, author of Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity

"The Farmerfield Mission illuminates part of the wide world of rural self-rule in nineteenth-century South Africa, which is much more varied than we had thought, and which has shaped the present in profound ways. Tracing a forgotten multi-ethnic community of Christian African peasants from the nineteenth century, past their destruction, to the politics of the present, Vernal uncovers a lost historical dimension and a lost potentiality for South Africa."—Paul S. Landau, author of Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400 to 1948

"Established in response to African initiative, situated in an area seen by the colonists as being 'white,' rather than a rural or urban 'location,' Farmerfield represents 'a new experiment in Methodist evangelical strategy: an exclusive African peasant community as the embodiment of a vital African Christianity and mature civilization.' This well-written and engaging account will appeal to students and researchers of mission history, and the broader history of the Eastern Cape."—Alan Kirkaldy, author of Capturing the Soul: The Vhavenda and the Missionaries, 1870-1900

From the Publisher