Of his latest post, Paul James-Griffiths of Christian Heritage Edinburgh writes “Last week I wrote about how Scottish Christians pioneered Lovedale as a model for southern Africa. Today, I briefly look at the other mission bases which sprang out of this model, especially Blythswood and Livingstonia.“

Livingstonia College, Jwhyte82 at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Common.

The Scottish Lovedale Missionary Institution had been established in 1824/1841 among the Xhosa people. This work bore much good fruit, so that others wanted to emulate this successful model, which became a beacon for the southern part of Africa.

Blythswood

In 1870 a request came from the locals in the Nqamakwe district in South Africa for a “child of Lovedale”to be set up for the people there. Captain Matthew Blyth, Revd Dr James Stewart of Lovedale, and Revd Richard Ross of the Cunningham Mission Station went to investigate. After much consultation with the locals, it was decided that their own people should be empowered to raise half the amount needed to build the institution, and that the church in Scotland would raise the other half. In the end the total amount needed to build and fit out the whole complex was over £7,000, but the locals themselves raised over £4,500, mostly through those who were not Christians, because they saw the opportunity to raise the lives of their children and culture and wanted to be involved in the sacrificial foundation. In 1877 the institution was opened with much joy and celebration, and like Lovedale it became a beacon of hope and transformation for so many.

Livingstonia

The next project to come out of the Lovedale model was Livingstonia (1894), named after Dr David Livingstone. The Free Church of Scotland had established a mission station at Cape Maclear in Malawi in 1875 through Lieutenant E.D. Young, Dr Robert Laws, six other Europeans, and four former slaves. The mission had to move twice to escape the malarial areas, eventually settling higher up, overlooking Lake Malawi. Dr Robert Laws (1851-1934) of Aberdeen, who had studied at the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, led the work for fifty-two years, leaving a legacy of a community of about 60,000 Christians, with many African pastors, and over 700 schools, which were educating over 44,000 pupils.

Robert Laws’ influence played a significant role in the long battle against the Arab slave trade, being a peacemaker in tribal wars, and a person who encouraged African Christians to be involved in policy-making in their own nations. Being a medical doctor he was keen for a hospital to be established at Livingstonia, which today serves a population of 60,000 people, and being a scholar, he longed for a university to be founded, which came about after his death, much later in 2003, when the University of Livingstonia opened its doors. Indeed, a whole town and industry grew around the mission.

By 1894 there were seven key institutions in place, mostly modelled on Lovedale. Lovedale and Blythswood served South Africa; Livingstonia served Tanzania and Malawi; the East African Scottish Mission, worked about 200 miles from Mombasa in Kenya; and two Church of England institutions and a French Protestant one also flourished in Africa. Through the insistence of Mary Slessor in Calabar, Nigeria, the Hope-Waddell Training Institution came into being in 1895. It was through this Christian movement that many other schools, colleges and universities were pioneered in Africa.