At long last, I have finally completed my transcription of The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society for all articles relating to their Central Africa Mission from 1876-1905. This represents the first 30 years of the mission, starting from when Robert Arthington offered £5,000 to get them to put a steamer on Lake Tanganyika.

This was definitely a project of the “we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy” category. I had been using the Chronicle as a resource because it is convenient documentation of early observations of the peoples and lands around Lake Tanganyika. Although modern technology is wonderful and nigh-magical, when it comes across PDFs of century-old missionary magazines sometimes the text recognition software doesn’t do so well (honestly amazing we have this technology at all, just to emphasize) and so the search function can be hit or miss. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just manually scroll through and transcribe everything so I can ensure that I get all the relevant information.” Very nearly three years after I began that project in earnest I have finally compiled my “complete” edition. It is only 322,104 words and 686 pages long.

My dream for this transcription is that it will be an easy reference document. That is why I compiled biographies for all the missionaries associated with the mission during this time period, available in the front of the PDF. I had also thought of putting together an index, to really add a sense of academic pizzazz, but upon further reflection I thought that the search function would now be a lot easier to use since I typed everything out and also adding an index would be a whole lot more work on top of what I already did and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. But, as I say throughout the document, if anyone out there in this big beautiful world of ours actually uses this resource please please please let me know I will be absolutely over the moon. I think my blog has been cited in at least one student’s college paper and I am happy about that. Please though if you do use it as a reference verify your quotes with the actual source document. I change a lot of spellings and although in this edition I went through and proofread everything, I can’t 100% guarantee I transcribed it all correctly. I’m only one guy.

I think I will put this project down for a while. I initially chose this time period because after 1905 the issues of the Chronicle available online began to peter out. That is until I made the extremely distressing discovery that the SOAS website now has (nearly) them all listed. So there is scope to do the next 30 years. However, I have a lot of Central Africa Mission books to read (and a lot of other books to read) and I want to get a move on with those. My other dream is to be able to spend a whole lot of time in the SOAS archives themselves and my other other dream is to do some on-the-ground research in Zambia, but for now the usual life things stand in the way. But this project will continue in one form or other.

Previous entries on my Chronicle series available here!