On the origin of a mission community: missionary enterprise in transition from pre-colonial fragmentation to colonial settlement, 1830-1847 -- The formation of Indaleni: integration of a refugee community into Natal' political economy, 1847-1851 -- The Indaleni mission: production relations, property, family life and piety -- Dissention and assimilation: parting with Allison and Edendale under Wesleyan Mission Society control -- The 1860s: Economic and social crisis at Edendale -- The Babblers: oNonhlevu evangelists and mission control -- Edendale' search for inclusion: exemption, collaboration and political organization -- The post-Shepstone era: colonial use the tribal tradition and its impact on the Edendale Kholwa -- Contracting opportunities: land purchase, depression and discrimination -- Land ownership: new patterns and implications -- Divided royalties: The Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 and its aftermath -- The Kholwa petty bourgeoisie: the impact of the Anglo Boer war (1899-1902) on the Edendale community.
Summary:
"This history of one of the earliest nineteenth-century mission stations in Natal traces the transformation in the lives of a community that settled first at Indaleni near Richmond and later at Edendale a few miles from Pietermaritzburg. Initially an independent mission under the religious and educational tutelage of James Allison, who left the Methodist Church to pursue independent mission work, Edendale was the first African community in Natal to experiment with freehold tenure. This had implications for the way its inhabitants were integrated into colonial society as educated, market-orientated producers and as citizens. They sought equal recognition, no different from British settlers. The concerns of this case study return to questions that dominated materialist debates in the 1980s, when the thesis on which this book is based was written. How did social relations of production and reproduction of communal kinship society mesh with those of the colonial capitalist economy, which in the nineteenth century was essentially a petty commodity economy within the beginnings of a plantation nexus? What were the mechanisms that led to the transformation of political and other social relations? How did ideological change occur in the context of religious conversion?"-- Back cover.
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