In The Famerfield Mission, Fiona Vernal recounts the history of an African Christian community on South Africa's troubled Eastern Cape frontier. Forged in the secular world of war, violence, and colonial dispossession and subjected to grand evangelical aspirations and social engineering, Farmerfield's heterogeneous mix of former slaves and displaced Africans from polities beyond the borders of the Cape Colony entered the powerful ideological arena of anti-slavery humanitarianism and evangelicalism. As a farm, an African residential site amid a white community, and a Christian mission...