Visions for Racial Equality: David Clement Scott and the Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century Malawi by Harri Englund

Abstract

Though he admits at the outset that writing this book “took me to archives and other sources unfamiliar to me from my previous research,” Englund crafts a masterfully interwoven biography of an often-neglected visionary in Malawi’s past (xiii). David Clement Scott emerges from this account as “a radical missionary” championing a “doctrine of humanity” encompassing Africans and Europeans in a single community rather than as merely the beleaguered late nineteenth-century head of the Church of Scotland’s Blantyre Mission depicted in many other historical accounts (110).1 Englund has assiduously embraced the historian’s task, taking great pains to locate scraps of Scott’s thought in letters and now little-read magazines—“Scott’s family had destroyed his personal papers”—scouring archives in Scotland, England, and Africa. He even visited collections of the Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian (ccap), in Malawi, which he found “in disrepair … [and] at varying stages of decay” (29, 265)Englund skillfully employs linguistic and theological analyses in offering a picture of Scott the man and, more importantly, his prescient perspective of “an interracial African future” capable of incorporating all drawn within its arms (151). Central to this interpretation is Scott’s insistence that Africa quickly taught him even more than he had to teach even his most precocious African converts, resulting in a “theology of reversals in an interracial African Church” (13). Englund structures this argument around more than just Scott’s effort to move toward a more inclusive social and political future in central Africa. He portrays Scott as engaged in an epic struggle—with both his Scottish supporters and a growing British colonial settler presence—to shape a fair and just intellectual framework for building such a society, a quest for “epistemic justice” (15). But in no sphere does this book do more to challenge the received wisdom of Malawi’s history than in the contrast that it presents between Scott and Alexander Hetherwick, his Blantyre Mission contemporary.The successor to Scott as head of the Blantyre Mission, Hetherwick is remembered most for his impassioned defense of Africans in the aftermath of John Chilembwe’s abortive liberation war in 1915, and for his subsequent service as an officially designated voice in behalf of Africans on Nyasaland’s colonial Legislative Council. Much more deliberately than previous writers, Englund carefully differentiates Hetherwick’s “paternalistic liberalism” from the clearly more compassionate view of African personhood that Scott held (249). “Nowhere in Hetherwick’s thought,” Englund insists, “were Europeans expected to learn as well as to teach, as in Scott’s vision” (259). Moreover, “Scott’s notion of the African Church consistently stressed its interracial composition,” whereas Hetherwick “added an exclusionary qualification to it—it was to become ‘the native African Church’” (245).Although Scott was condemned by the growing commercial settler interests in the formal British Protectorate—leading to his removal by his employers in the Church of Scotland—Hetherwick embraced that new colonial dispensation, even becoming one of the founders of the Blantyre Chamber of Commerce, “an organization for White planters and traders” (260). Successfully navigating the minefield of intellectual history, Englund carefully demonstrates how these differences created an epistemological chasm between the men. He quotes a frustrated Scott lamenting obliquely in the Mission’s newsletter shortly before his ouster that “nothing saps a man’s strength like prejudice” (196).Nothing in what Englund writes suggests that Hetherwick was a stalking horse for the extreme segregation prevalent in southern Africa a half-century later. This book insists, however, that “Hetherwick’s leadership erased any alternatives that Scott’s vision may have suggested” for a more egalitarian society in Central Africa (264). Nonetheless, as a methodological tour de force, Visions for Racial Equality exceeds in both scope and execution another intellectual biography, that of T. Cullen Young, another otherwise neglected Scottish missionary in central Africa.2 In so doing, Englund opens a much richer view to the history, and historiography, of Malawi.