Mission Station Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: A Spatial Lens

The height of what we might call “the mission station era” in Africa occurred during the nineteenth century, when increasing numbers of missionaries from Europe and North America established distinct residential-religious sites that they referred to as “mission stations.” The chapter offers glimpses from one mission station in nineteenth-century southeastern Africa and uses this example as a window onto the complex dynamics that unfolded on and around the stations. One way to gain an understanding of these dynamics is to view them through a spatial lens, and the chapter is divided into four sections that each considers the mission station using a different spatial framework: as a moral geography, a heterotopia, a third space, and an imagined center. As we turn from one spatial framework to the next, new aspects of the place are continuously revealed, and the chapter argues that the mission station space was not fully controlled by any single group and did not advance a single project, such as Christianity or colonialism. Rather, the stations intersected with the projects and desires of several historical actors in complicated ways.