Sartorial Settlement: The Mission Field and Transformation in Colonial Natal, 1850-1897

This article explores the dynamics of the mission field in the nineteenth-century British colony of Natal in southern Africa. By "mission field" I mean the broader bundle of concepts, aspirations, and activities that surrounded the work of Christian conversion in Natal. The term denotes both a material process—proselytization, primarily within the physical spaces of missionary stations—and a discursive one—reliance upon the articulation of difference to justify both settler occupation and imperial attempts to reshape indigenous life. For colonial actors, the "civilizing mission" within Christianity required revolutions in clothing, which were viewed as material manifestations of divine transformation. The mission field operated as more than a side theater of colonialism; rather, it represented the stakes of settlement—that bodies and souls both indigenous and settler would be transformed into industrious and moral paragons, albeit unequally and with respect to the inherent raced and gendered hierarchies embedded within Natal.