Dissertation Information for Steven Douglas EdgingtonNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Economic and social dimensions of mission farms on the Mashonaland high veld, 1890-1930s Abstract: Between 1890 and the 1930s, Anglican, Catholic (Jesuit and Trappist), Wesleyan Methodist, and American Methodist mission churches acquired over twenty extensive properties in the Mashonaland high veld region of Southern Rhodesia through land grants from the British South Africa Company (BSAC) or through land purchases. These farms provided the material base and the environment of social control eagerly adopted by the missionaries to extend the influence of their respective churches over expanding territories and substantial African populations. This study seeks to understand the economic and social dimensions of these mission farms within the larger context of white settler domination, the main features of which have been established by the land and labor historiography for Zimbabwe in the colonial period. Through archival research on the extensive primary documentation compiled by the mission churches and the colonial administration, and through oral interviews of surviving residents of the farms, the economic imperatives and control imperatives that guided the missionaries' relationship with African tenants, wage workers, social refugees, and students are clearly established. These dimensions of the mission farms become apparent in the earlier chapters, which assert a scheme of interpretive periodization in a chronological assessment of the development of the farms, as well as in the later chapters which address some of the most prominent features of the farms thematically. The economic and control imperatives also help explain the partnership between the mission churches and the colonial administration, a partnership begun with BSAC land grants and nourished by a steadily increasing dosage of government grants for mission schools, and by a shared desire for the control of African labor and behavior. Finally, the impact of the mission farms is assessed in light of not only the effects brought about by the actions of the missionaries and their churches, but also from the perspective of African initiative. African mission farm tenants, wage workers, women, and students negotiated difficult social terrain in Southern Rhodesia. The mission farms were a unique feature on that social landscape, providing their own particular opportunities, choices, obstacles and challenges to Africans in search of strategies for survival and useful social mobility. |
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