ABSTRACT
The remnants of the mud-brick village that forms the earliest part of Georgetown, Edendale, on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu Natal, serves as a reminder that histories and architectures are not necessarily as we immediately perceive them or assume them to have been, nor is the generally constructed notion of colonialism as simple as it sounds. Project work on the Victorian mud-brick cottages, largely built by Wesleyan amaHlubi and SeSwathi2African converts at the end of the nineteenth century, invert the commonly considered ideas of colonialism, power and prestige. The practical nature of the project also contributes information to our modern-day constructs of history and assumed historic spatial arrangements. Also, the site is unique in that it consists of a series of temporal layers, a continuously documented legacy which spans from its early Afrikaner grant-farm survey to a prosperous and multicultural mission village that flourished until the peak of apartheid. This constructed peri-urban landscape may owe its layout to the original missionary leader, James Allison, but the continued use of the site allocations after he had left, as well as the communal creation of a model for expansion and its implementation, was embraced by the African inhabitants who subscribed to the Victorian architectural and cultural paradigm.
