Black Lives Matter? Reassessing Alexander Hetherwick of Blantyre

Abstract

The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has raised critical awareness of how concepts of race have shaped history. In the context of mission history, this has prompted critical reflection on encounters with the Global South at the intersection of colonial assumptions of the superiority of Western culture and race and the underlying belief in the value of all human beings that drove Christian mission. A simple bifurcation of mission into these impulses, however, oversimplifies the dynamic interplay between the two and fails to adequately gauge how this changed over the longer durée, leaving an unsatisfactory and unresolved polarity. This article re-examines the career of the Scottish missionary Alexander Hetherwick of Blantyre to locate how concepts of race within his thought and action changed throughout a career that spanned the shift of the region from mission field to integrated protectorate within the empire, significantly shaping the formation of modern Malawi.