Fourteen Stations of the Cross is framed against the background of the colonial enterprise in southern Africa and the ways in which the region was transformed and `civilised’. The `wild’ and `formless worlds’ of what Europeans saw as `primitive’ African life lay open to travellers, illustrators, artists, naturalists, missionaries, hunters, and colonial administrators whose mission was to awaken and convert what they considered to be a dark and unrefined world. This systematisation of `formless worlds’ calls up the image of Adam moving through his domain, mapping, classifying, picturing, and naming. David Livingstone was indeed one of the `Adams' of the British empire in southern Africa, `penetrating' and opening up new regions to the process of civilisation, trade and commerce, and with the other explorers, prepared southern and central Africa for Cecil John Rhodes' dream of British colonial expansion stretching from the Cape to Cairo. The Christian church cannot, therefore, be separated from the broader discourse of colonial political and economic imperialism. To secure its power and to ensure its survival as 'the one true religion', Christianity had to create its antithesis, a world of darkness, and it was Africa that was to become the representative of the antithesis by means of which Western Christianity defined itself during the nineteenth century.

Fourteen Stations of the Cross approaches the initial journey of Christianity into the interior of South Africa as an allegorical narrative of redemption, reconciliation and healing. The book explores the paradoxical and ambiguous interplay between histories, textures and nuances where the interaction between images and text offer the opportunity to create a rich variety of compound meanings through playful and interactive poetic interactions.