Men on the Mines: The Environmental Consequences of Missionary Masculinity

For over a decade in the first half of the twentieth century, the Congregationalist missionary Ray Phillips worked with men on the mines of South Africa, attempting to combine both social control measures and evangelistic programs. This paper considers Phillips’s pre-1930 activities on the mines as representative of the larger missionary population and the violence inherent in their activities – both in social control and the remaking of indigenous minds, as well as in the environmental consequences of gold mining, and argues that they are related as part of the same program of western subjugation, through combining theories and practices from colonial/imperial studies, missiology, ecotheology, and history.