Genevieve Maynard Photography

Between 1882 – 1901 the Trappist order of monks, headed by Abbot Franz Pfanner, established 21 missions within a 200km radius of Marianhill monastery near Pinetown, KwaZulu – Natal. In the Trappist tradition of hard manual labour and self-sufficiency, the missions had varying industries – a mill, a press, forges, bakeries, clinics – as well as schools and churches.
 
Pfanner was by all accounts a dynamic and charismatic man who struggled to incorporate the Benedictine rule of maintaining silence with the need to speak in order to educate and proselytise. Perhaps unsurprisingly he ran afoul of his peers and superiors and was eventually suspended and then resigned, living until his death fifteen years later in a remote area two hours by ox-cart from Lourdes, KZN.
 
The history of the Trappist missions and their missionaries and the work they did in KZN is complex and interwoven with race and politics, religion and colonialism, conquest and colonisation. The monks designed and built the mission station buildings and churches themselves, using local resources such as sandstone, timber and clay, and training labourers as they went. Some altarpieces were commissioned, shipped in from overseas and transferred to the various sites by ox cart.
The work done by the monks and local labourers should be understood and appreciated in the context of the rural and remote landscape of this part of KZN in that era.