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!

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We take a break from Puerto Rico content (there is a lot more to come, don’t worry) so as to bring you, my loyal reader(s), what will likely be the last segment of my transcriptions of the The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society for a while at least (please see previous segments here: 1876-1880, 1881-1885, 1886-1890, 1891-1895, 1896-1900). However don’t fret! This project is far from over. It is just that, as I alluded to at the end of the last installment, the availability of the Chronicle past 1905 becomes spotty thus making it difficult to put together full transcriptions.

What I would like to do as a next step is put together all 30 years I have transcribed so far (30 years ain’t too shabby, is it?) and extract from it useful information to guide follow-on research. I am specifically thinking at minimum an index, but I would like to compile a timeline of the Central Africa Mission and put together short biographies of all the missionaries, at least as far as their association with Central Africa and the LMS goes. Someday when I A) figure out how to apply for a research grant or something, B) apply for those grants, and C) win one, I would like to go out and find the years of the Chronicle that the internet doesn’t have yet and also of course get my butt over to London to look at all the LMS archives in the flesh. And then I dunno write a book or something? But to write a book I would also want to do a lot more research on the ground in Zambia, and we can already see this is more than a nights and weekends project. But a boy can dream.

But back to these five years, specifically (those are 1901-1905, just to recap). Since it is now tradition, I will say that this edition bucks the trend of downward word counts, coming in at about 54,000 words (the whole project is running to over 300,000, so the proofreading required for the compiled edition will take a hot minute). It also features a whopping 45 pictures, representing very nearly half of the total pictures from Central Africa the Chronicle published over the entire 30 years I have covered.

The Mission is well established at this point, even to the extent that by the end of 1905 Rev. R. Stewart Wright is talking about the work of “our early missionaries, some twenty years ago.” The Mission is, however, still expanding, setting up new bases in “Awemba Country” (Bemba in the modern parlance). Besides their drive to evangelize as much as possible, that effort was driven also by a fear of the Catholics claiming more area (there is a short article, tinged with fear, noting that the White Fathers have the rest of Lake Tanganyika surrounded by well-staffed stations, with some of their African converts being trained in medicine) as well as the not-so-hidden protagonist of this whole story, Mr. Robert Arthington, of Leeds, donating £10,000 for “the extension of mission work to the Awemba tribes” (Although Mr. Arthington died in 1900, he left a final donation to the London Missionary Society that was to only be used for new endeavors and not for the maintenance of the Society’s established endeavors, which due to some court stuff continued to cause the Society some headache throughout this period).

As illustrated by the group photo at the top, the Mission is also benefitting from being it seems less deadly to missionaries than it was in its early years. I am sure this is a byproduct of them figuring some stuff out (like in 1897 the fact that mosquitoes transmit malaria) as well as colonialism making it easier for these British people to travel around and communicate with central Africa. It was safe enough that they are regularly sending out women to the Mission, albeit it as the betrothed to missionaries already in the field (where they hop on down to the magistrate in Abercorn to get hitched) and not as missionaries in their own right. There was still danger of course, but at this point when a missionary in central Africa dies it is shocking instead of routine.

The biggest development I was pleased with at this point is that the Chronicle mentions Africans with increasing regularity. I know it’s a minor thing but hey in a literal sense at least it’s not nothing. I think a big chunk of this is that the missionaries are finally having some success in converting Africans to Christianity, once they had really settled down and had a generation of people grow up around them.

So that’s that, for now. As always, if you are finding this useful or want to swap info on the Central African Mission of the London Missionary Society, hit me up. I would be very excited to hear from you.

Reading this week:

• Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters by Captain G.L. Sulivan, R.N.
• Across Africa by Commander V.L. Cameron, R.N., C.B., D.C.L.
• Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

This post has been superseded!

Look guys I know it is absolutely astounding that I have posted sections from The Chronicle two weeks in a row. I can barely believe it myself and for the sake of my reader(s) I hope you like this content and are not pining after descriptions of me wandering around art museums or something. I like it and that’s all that matters on my blog. Anyways. A couple of factors at play here. First is that the downward trend in the length of these updates continue their downward trend, this one clocking in at juuuust shy of 33,000 words. More importantly however is that I was procrastinating some things and doing this was my excuse to avoid doing the other things. Please see previous updates in my plan to transcribe every article in The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society relating to their Central Africa Mission here: 1876-1880, 1881-1885, 1886-1890, 1891-1895.

I have mentioned several times now that the first reason I got interested in the London Missionary Society is because they launched the first steamship on Lake Tanganyika, the SS Good News. That era in LMS history has come and gone, however this era we are entering now is interesting because it much more closely overlaps my own experience in Zambia.

The Society by the end of this era is running three main Mission stations, having given up the Urambo Mission to Moravian missionaries in 1898 in order to consolidate their efforts at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. There is a mission at Kambole, which I think was in the area now occupied by Nsumbu National Park, which I am sad that I never got to go to. Then there are missions at Niamkolo and Kawimbe. When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer I lived about smack dab in the middle of those two stations, making the LMS’s old stomping grounds my old stomping grounds. I’ve used pictures from this era of the Chronicle to talk about some of these things, such as Niamkolo church.

I also got interested in Kawimbe because that is where large chunks of the story of Mama Meli took place. In that article I just linked one of the things that my friend Katie and I looked at was a cemetery where many of the missionaries were buried. As part of this project I have finally been able to connect the names on some of these gravestones with the stories of the people behind them. One of the things I want to do if I am ever in Zambia again is to go back to that cemetery and do a better job photographing the memorials and documenting the people buried there. But when I do manage to identify one, such as John May Jr. or, below, Dr. Charles B. Mather, it feels like an exciting accomplishment:

But besides people dying, what’s going on with the Central African Mission? Both a lot and not so much. In 1897 they sent out seven new missionaries to Central Africa (with the Hemans returning), significantly boosting that Mission, since the numbers had dwindled to three people. This significant increase should have led to a lot more activity in the missions, and I think it will and does eventually, but for a long stretch during this interval things are pretty quiet as I think the new missionaries get up to speed and more settled. As I keep saying during these summaries the missions are getting more and more settled and integrated (they proudly talk about at one point that the Central African missions had finally become self-sustaining as far as local expenditure is concerned) and that continues to be the case here. Colonialism continues to take hold as well (“British Central Africa” is referred to regularly), and there is even now a telegraph line to Mbala/Abercorn. The Mission also at this point has a small but regular number of converts coming in, the payoff for their now 25 years in Central Africa. As I read about the Missionaries training carpenters and blacksmiths and converting people to Christianity, I think about the different churches I saw during my time in Zambia or the carpenters and metalworkers that I met, and I wonder which and how many of those people are the direct cultural descendants of the people that these missionaries trained.

As always, if you are finding this useful (or maybe just finding this at all) I would be absolutely delighted to know. My current thinking is that I will keep this project going through about 1915, which will put us into World War I and I think the London Missionary Society might no longer necessarily be the best place to find out about the culture and people in the area. But that is pure conjecture; I’ve never read that far in the Chronicle (though honestly issues become harder to find online at that point). But I guess we’ll see when I get there.

Reading this week:

• The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name by Jason K. Stearns

This post has been superseded!

Friends, I am stunned and astonished to say that I have completed yet another installment of my plan to transcribe every article in The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society relating to their Central Africa Mission (here is: 1876-1880, 1881-1885, 1886-1890). I have been starting with their stats, so I will let you know that this is even shorter than the previous “teeny-tiny update” at only 36,700 or so words. It does however have something like double the number of pictures as the preceding 15 years of articles combined.

Previously I posited that the amount of coverage the Central African Mission was getting had nosedived because it had become Just Another Mission within the London Missionary Society’s repertoire, and that I think is still true. My numbers are a little artificial too, because sometimes I skipped articles when the mention of the Mission was literally only passing. Also, the format of the Chronicle also changed during this time period to be longer and fancier (and with more pictures), but also mentions of the Central African Mission can arise in a wider variety of spots (different “Secretarial Notes,” in regular columns like “Month to Month” and “Personal Notes,” and sometimes in space-filling asides at the bottom of otherwise unrelated columns) so I am worried I missed some things, despite scrolling through every page. Another reason I think coverage was diminished in this era is because 1895 was the centenary of the London Missionary Society, and they were focused on their older missions, such as the South Seas and South Africa.

One of the themes I see running throughout these five years is the London Missionary Society coming to grips with the impact of colonization on their sought-after flock. Colonization is firmly established at this time – in 1894 they even see A.J. Swann resign his post with the Society “in consequence of his having accepted an official position under the British Administrator in Central Africa.” In general too the Society is in favor of colonization, welcoming a “flood” of Europeans into Africa even as they bemoan this flood is too focused on seeking gold over the spiritual enlightenment of the people. However, in a surprisingly (to me) progressive note, the Foreign Secretary, Rev. Thompson, worries about an effort by Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company to take what is now Botswana away from direct rule by the British Empire and put it under direct control of the company:

Now it transpires that Lord Knutsford, when Colonial Secretary, promised the Company that in due time the Bechwanaland Protectorate should be added to their dominions. Lord Ripon in turn confirmed this promise, and now Mr. Rhodes is agitating for the realization of the compact. The chiefs and people of Bechwanaland object to the change. They have no complaint to make against the Company, but they see that it is a company with the interests of its own shareholders to care for. They think that Imperial rule is likely to be more impartial and unbiased than even the best-intentioned financial corporation.

R. Wardlaw Thompson, October 1895

The Society is forced in this era to take a look at what they have wrought, and decide whether they approve of what they have done.

Just to mention a few other things that happened during this era. First, when describing a trip through Bembaland (here “Awemba”) in an article from January 1895, Rev. W. Thomas (not the Foreign Secretary) notes “How little credit the native gets, as a rule, in books of travel!” I’ve commented on the same thing to criticize my own writing, so good on him here. It is also during this time that a great era for the London Missionary Society came to and end: in a note on the “Proceedings of the Board” in May of 1894, they announce that “the sale of the Mission steamer, Good News, on Lake Tanganyika, Central Africa, to the African Lakes Company (Limited), was approved.” How short a useful life that boat lived despite all the effort and lives that went into putting it on the Lake. But by this time Kavala Island had been abandoned, with the focus of the Mission moving inland, and they had little use for it. Their needs seem to have been adequately met by the Morning Star, but it was wrecked in February of 1895 in a gale (though they think they can repair it). As I have mentioned, the whole reason I started researching this stuff was because I was interested in these boats.

Anyways! As I always say at the end of these posts, if you find this useful please leave a note at the bottom of the post. I would be very interested to see if anyone is as interested in this stuff as I am and are finding these transcriptions useful. Someday I want to compile them all into one big document (and it will be very big) with regularized spellings and a nice index and maybe biographical notes of the missionaries so it’s easy to see who was where, when. But there is a lot of typing to do between now and then.

P.S. – I don’t have a great place to put these, but check out these pictures by Rev. D.P. Jones of two dudes fishing at Niamkolo and a stockade fence with human skulls:

Reading this week:

• The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah

This post has been superseded!

In the unsustainably short interval of only five weeks, I am once again pleased to announce the third part of my ongoing project to transcribe every article in The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society relating to their Central Africa mission. The interval was so short because it has been a very slow period at work, but also because this is a teeny-tiny update, at a mere 38,000 words. I was wondering if this update would put the totals for this project above the 200,000 word mark, but it was not to be.

In this third semi-decade of the Central Africa Mission’s existence, it seems to be gaining a very different character. The reporting on the Mission in the Chronicle really took a nosedive. Part of the reason for that is fighting in the area cutting off the mails and therefore communication with the mission, so the Chronicle was forced to just give mild speculation based on rumors they had heard with no actual information. But I think a much bigger reason is that the Mission had simply become just another mission.

By this point they were fairly well established in Central Africa. They had four main stations – Urambo, their first permanent station; Kavala Island, where they had set up their marine department when it was clear they were unwelcome in Ujiji; Niamkolo (spelled Niumkorlo during these years) to get a presence at the south end of the lake; and Fwambo, a newly established mission “fifty miles inland on the route to Lake Nyassa” (I think this is now Kawimbe Mission, but I am not sure). The routes to these stations were well-established, the mail fairly regular (when there wasn’t fighting), and the Missionaries were spending their time building their infrastructure and their trust with the local communities. This is not the exciting part of missionary work. If there was exciting stuff, it wasn’t actually reported in the Chronicle – often the editor notes that urgent news had been reported in the daily papers, and in this magazine they were then just noting that all had turned out well (or not).

The Mission also starts to be swept up in world events. In 1876 they were some of the only Europeans in the area, but by 1890 colonization is starting to firmly take hold. Part of the reason for the fighting that cut off the mails is that the Germans were attempting to take hold of what would become German East Africa, and the native peoples were fighting back. Then in March of 1890 the Chronicle is reporting on a speech from the Duke of Fife where he discusses the recently founded British South Africa Company. And in December of 1890 they even note that Urambo is likely to be made a military station. The London Missionary Society in 1890 is no longer the vanguard of the European takeover in the Tanganyika region.

For our interests here in this blog there are a few other developments. This era is when James Hemans heads to the mission. On the other hand, our man Ed Hore has left the mission, with the latest news that he has gone on a tour of the Society’s missions around Australia. His wife, Annie Hore, was left in London to give birth to their daughter. Annie had been the first woman sent out to Central Africa by the Society and founded the Mission’s first school, the Kavala Island Girls’ School pictured above. While she was the first, in this era it is now becoming common for men to go out with their wives, a further signal that Central Africa was no longer the wild domain of only people like Livingstone and Stanley, as far as Europe was concerned.

Although the London Missionary Society might have felt that Central Africa was no longer so dangerous, with family life taking hold in the Mission comes the normal tragedies of everyday existence. In June 1889’s “Announcements” they report under Births: “Jones – November 16th, at Fwambo, Central Africa, the wife of the Rev. D.P. Jones, of a son.” Then, on the very next line under Deaths: “Jones – December 26th, at Fwambo, Central Africa, the infant son of the Rev. D.P. Jones, aged 6 weeks.”

As ever, if you find this work useful, please let me know. I’d be excited to collaborate.

This post has been superseded!

I am pleased to announce the second part of what must be honestly the most anticipated project of the century, to wit me transcribing every article in The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society relating to their Central Africa mission. The first part of this project spanned the years 1876 to 1880 (more details on this project overall at that link), and the second part, linked above and embedded below, covers the next five years, 1881-1885.

This batch of transcriptions clocks in at a relatively modest 66,000 words, about 15,000 fewer words than the last time. Opening up the last time I posted a batch of transcriptions I am more than a little surprised that it was only back in April. This feels like a project I have been neglecting for ages, but there ya go, I’m slightly better than I thought. I have become more familiar with The Chronicle during the course of this project and so I am better at extracting the relevant bits. However, the magazine got a new editor in 1885, and so far I can’t really say I like what he’s done with it, but it’s a tad late to complain.

The single biggest revelation I’ve had so far about The Chronicle is that I realized that it is a fundraising document. Up until that revelation I had been thinking of The Chronicle as this handy record created specifically for my benefit. If that were the case, though, it’s honestly a bit of a weird read. They’re Victorians and I am under the impression that this was normal for them, but they go into a lot of gory detail about people’s illnesses. For example they print, at length, the sufferings of Dr. Southon after he is accidentally shot in the arm and slowly dies from infection.

It finally occurred to me that the audience of this magazine are all the churchgoers they are trying to convince to donate to the London Missionary Society. Every year in June the Society publishes their annual report, including a detailed look at their finances. In the transcription I try to translate these into modern-day dollars, and every year the Society needs to fundraise the equivalent of millions of dollars just to try to keep themselves afloat. I realized that the main purpose of The Chronicle was therefore probably to let people know how their donations were being spent, and present an image of a Society doing the best missionary work out of many competing missionary societies while letting people know that they still desperately needed more funds. Someday, when I sit down and actually analyze all that I’ve typed, I will have to keep that in mind.

When we left the missionaries in 1880, they had set up several missionary stations between Zanzibar and Ujiji and were starting to make forays towards the south of Lake Tanganyika. My interest in the London Missionary Society started because I was interested in the first steamship on Lake Tanganyika, the SS Good News. I’m going to grant myself an historic parallel by mentioning that what was the final spur to get LMS setting out into the region was a desire to put a steamship on the lake. So while the SS Good News is a throughline through the entire first decade of the Central Africa Mission, it is during 1881-1885, and really towards the latter part of that timeframe in which the story of the Good News really gets going; it is in August of 1885 that The Chronicle reports the ship was launched (though it still had a lot of fitting out to do).

Despite the mission’s nautical success, however, it is really not in a good place by the end of 1885. Central Africa was deadly for missionaries. In a lengthy November 1885 article, it’s noted that “since the commencement of the Mission in 1876, twenty-three persons have gone out to take part in the work, and of these no fewer than ten have been removed by death, and nine have retired from the service.” Although many of the nine that retired from the service but didn’t die did so out of general poor health, it is also in this same article that The Chronicle details a new development among the missionaries – people quitting out of fear. The Chronicle published excerpts of letters from recently deployed missionaries saying that they were headed home, not necessarily because they were sick, but because they finally noticed how many people were dying and wanted out before they too were struck down. With those two missionaries heading home, at the end of 1885:

The entire Mission staff is thus reduced to four. The Rev. T.F. Shaw is laboring alone at Urambo, and is the only missionary specially set apart for the work of preaching and teaching. The rest – Captain Hore, Mr. A.J. Swann, and Mr. A. Brooks – went out as laymen, the two former in charge of the boats on Lake Tanganyika, and Mr. Brooks as an artisan missionary.

My final note on this batch of transcriptions is that until this point, I had considered the colonization of this area as somewhere between an unfortunate side effect and an unrelated but parallel enterprise to the evangelization by the missionaries. But now a letter from Captain Hore states plainly that he envisioned European colonization as part and parcel of the enterprise all along: “As to the future of the Mission… if we look further off it is nothing but a tide of Europeans crowding into the continent from all sides, and plenty of the ‘fit’ surviving and evangelizing, colonizing, or amassing wealth, according to their several missions.” I think the missionaries deserve credit for their part in combatting the slave trade in the region, the dire effects of which are also detailed by Captain Hore in this era of The Chronicle. But we have to keep in mind that you don’t have to be intending bad outcomes for bad outcomes to happen, and when we consider the impact these missionaries had we must carefully weigh the bad outcomes along with the good.

If there are any researchers out there using this work, please let me know. I would be delighted to chat more about the history of this region and see what you’re digging up. I don’t know if anyone is using my last batch of transcriptions, but I think I have been cited in at least one college paper from the University of Zambia on World War I, at least. I would like to figure out something productive to do with all this research, but I know my biggest hurdle will be figuring out a way to center African voices into these African stories, and I am conscious I might not be the guy to do that. But between here and that, we have a few more decades to transcribe.