Here, I intend to explore the significance of the LMS museum as a site of deposition for material that originated in missionary encounters and exchanges in southern Africa during the first third of the 19th century.

The museum also included numerous natural history specimens, and the description refers to ‘two large crocodiles ... killed in the Lempopo river ... and presented by Mr Moffat’, as well as the large giraffe, shot by Campbell’s party in 1814, standing at the centre of the museum alongside the Rarotongan ‘staff god’. 16

commenced their labours, the Cape slaves were a mixed people, but chiefly captured from Madagascar and the south-east coast of Africa. There was also a Malay (Mohammedan) element, introduced into the country by those who were at once masters in the Indian Archipelago and at the Cape. As to South African races, the reader will please to note carefully that, philologically, there are only two families of natives in all South Africa—the Gariepine, or yellow and oblique-eyed people, and the Bantu people, who are of a more dusky hue. The Gariepine* family include the Hottentots, Namaquas, Korannas, and E * Gariep is a native name for the

read considerably, and had been enriched by the arrival, in 1688, of a number of French Huguenots—refugees from the oppression of Louis XIV.—the peculiar arrangements of the Dutch Company repressed the growth of the Colony, and imposed galling restraints upon the people. Indeed, the

were never saleable. As to the condition of the slaves at the Cape in connection with Christianity, I shall quote the following sentences from Mr. Theal’s “ History of South Africa’ :— “According to the Dutch law no baptized person could be a slave, and this law, which was intended to raise Christian bondsmen to the position of free men effectually prevented the propagation of Christianity among them. The act of baptism being made equivalent to an act of manumission, it was to the owner’s interest to keep his slave in ignorance; and thus a law made to encourage Christianity actually prohibited it.” It is not easy for us now, either in Britain or in the Cape Colony,

Not only does this neglect the work of women as wives and teachers, but it diverts attention from the Africans who were everywhere the dominant force in the spread of modern Christianity. By the turn of the 20th century, evangelism had escaped the bounds of mission stations driven by African initiative and the appearance of so-called “faith missions” based on a model of itinerant preaching.

Missionary work in central and southern Africa began in the early 19th century, before Europeans had colonized those regions. Missionaries were among the earliest explorers of central and southern Africa. The London Missionary Society sent David Livingstone to South Africa in 1840, where he became one of the first Europeans to traverse the continent. When Europeans began to colonize central and southern Africa toward the end of the century, international coordination featured prominently in both missionary and colonial projects.