The Platberg Wesleyan mission station, 1833-1865: A landscape revealed

Abstract

The remains of the Wesleyan mission station, Platberg, are located in the eastern Free State, close to the Lesotho border. Occupied for approximately 30 years between 1833 and 1865, it was home to successive missionaries and their families, a community of people called Bastaards, and surrounded by large groups of Basotho. The mission station was designed and built with a specific message in mind, a message of westernization and ‘civilization’. This landscape was negotiated and manipulated differently by each individual and/or group who lived there. Notions of privacy and intimacy were continuously negotiated on a landscape designed to be visible, public, and impressive, and these interactions differed from personality to personality. Furthermore, a dialectic between permanence and transience played out on a landscape that was constructed to reflect specific Wesleyan ideals. A study of both the archaeological remains and several historical sources are drawn on to measure the success of the Platberg mission station, and this information is then bolstered through a comparison with a study of a second station, Matlwase