MISSIONARIES 
205 
knowledge. Almost invariably it has been to missionaries that the natives 
of Interior Africa have owed their first acquaintance with the printing press, 
the turning lathe, the mangle, the flat iron, the saw mill, and the brick mould. 
Industrial teaching is coming more and more into favour, and its immediate 
results in British Central Africa have been most encouraging. Instead of 
importing printers, carpenters, store clerks, cooks, telegraphists, gardeners, 
natural history collectors from England or India, we are gradually becoming 
able to obtain them amongst the natives of the country, who are trained in 
the missionaries’ schools, and who having been given simple wholesome local 
education have not had their heads turned, are not above their station in life, 
and consequently do not prove the disastrous failures I have introduced in 
my foregoing references to typical individuals sent for their education to South 
Africa or the United Kingdom. At the Government press at Zomba there is 
but one European superintendent—all the other printers being mission-trained 
natives. Most of the telegraph stations are entirely worked by negro telegraph 
clerks also derived from the missions. As an instance of the intelligence of 
some of these missionary scholars, I have given at the end of the chapter dealing 
with the flora of British Central Africa a list and description of the native trees 
which is a really remarkable essay sent to me in the native tongue by a 
Blantyre scholar. 1 
Who can say with these facts before them, with the present condition of the 
natives in South Africa to consider, with the gradual civilisation of Western 
Africa, 2 3 that missionary work has been a failure or anything but a success in the 
Dark Continent ? 
Is it of no account, do you think, is it productive of no good effect in the 
present state of Africa, that certain of our fellow-countrymen—-or women— 
possessed of at least an elementary education, and impelled by no greed of gain 
or unworthy motive—should voluntarily locate themselves in the wild parts of 
this undeveloped quarter of the globe, and, by the very fact that they live in a 
European manner, in a house of European style, surrounded by European 
implements, products, and adornments, should open the eyes of the brutish 
savages to the existence of a higher state of culture, and prepare them for the 
approach of civilisation ? I am sure my readers will agree with me that it is as 
the preparer of the white man’s advent, as the mediator between the barbarian 
native and the invading race of rulers, colonists, or traders, that the missionary 
earns his chief right to our consideration and support. He constitutes himself 
informally the tribune of the weaker race, and though he may sometimes be 
open to the charges of indiscretion, exaggeration, and partiality in his support 
of his dusky-skinned clients’ claims, yet without doubt he has rendered real 
services to humanity in drawing extra-colonial attention to many a cruel abuse 
of power, and by checking the ruthless proceedings of the unscrupulous pioneers 
of the white invasion. 
Indirectly, and almost unintentionally, missionary enterprise has widely 
increased the bounds of our knowledge, and has sometimes been the means 
1 This essay has been kindly translated for me into English by the Rev. Alexander Hetherwick of the 
Church of Scotland Mission, but I understand sufficient of Chinyanja, having the original with me, to 
know that the translation though a smooth one imparts no sense into the text which is not to be found in 
the original document. To test the intelligence of these scholars of the Blantyre Mission Schools I had 
offered a small prize for the best essay on this subject. There were many competitors and some of the 
essays were very good besides that one which I now publish, and which was adjudged to be the best. 
3 Where the Basel missionaries have played much the same part as the British missionaries in Nyasa- 
land in introducing-industrial teaching. 
