Abstract

While producing a guide to the diaries and journals in the Cory Library many years ago, I found two bound volumes of a largely unfathomable journal written by an early missionary of the Glasgow Missionary Society, James Laing. These volumes were housed as part of the extensive and valued Lovedale Collection. They were unnumbered but the entry dates ranged from 1845 to 1872.

Highlights

  • Writing a history involving missionaries in South Africa is a charged project, bedevilled by a variety of ghosts

  • There have been well-known exceptions, the luminaries who did not fit the prescriptive box of categorisation: we think of the Reverend Theo van der Kemp, Dr John Philip and the Reads

  • The historian Elizabeth Elbourne wrote about the daunting task facing the missionary biographer way back in 1991: Writing a history involving missionaries in South Africa is a charged project, bedevilled by a variety of ghosts

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Summary

Introduction

Writing a history involving missionaries in South Africa is a charged project, bedevilled by a variety of ghosts. Indoda Ebisithanda (“The Man who Loved Us”): The Reverend James Laing among the amaXhosa

Results
Conclusion

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