BOOK REVIEW

Reviewed by SHERIDAN GRISWOLD
Correspondent | Friday November 6, 2009 00:00

Little Giant of Bechuanaland is the story of pioneer missionary Reverend William Charles Willoughby (1857 to 1938) and his dedicated wife Bessie Willoughby. He is most famous for his role with the 'Three Chiefs' when they went to London in 1895, something that has been written about extensively, but not completely. Professor Neil Parsons called Willoughby a 'pathfinder' in his book King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen (1998) and the Three Kings (the Dikgosi Khama III, Bathoen I and Sebele I) his 'reluctant followers'.

Willoughby is remembered by many older Batswana for a number of other significant contributions he made to Botswana over the 24 years he lived in Southern Africa as a missionary, an educator, a linguist, a researcher, writer and author of five significant books, and a photographer.

Little Giant of Bechuanaland was launched on September 2, 2009 at the Botswana National Archives and Record Services (BNARS) - one of the sponsors of the book. At the launch, Dr James Wilkinson, Willoughby's Great-grandson, donated to Botswana three photo albums on old Palapye and Serowe that had been in the family for over 100 years.

The keynote address was by former Minister of Youth, Sport and Culture, Gladys Kokorwe. She blessed BNARS for its role in preserving the heritage of Botswana, congratulated the Botswana Society and the Mmegi Publishing House for their part in producing the book and thanked the author, Reverend Dr Rutherford for his hard work (because of his age and health he could not be present). Rutherford is also known to many Batswana as he was the principal of Serowe Teachers' Training College.

Willoughby was born in Cornwall in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1857, his mother Anne's first child of 12. He was educated at Spring Hill College where missionary work became his 'Call'.  He had his first year in Africa in 1882-1883 when he was a young and formative 25-year-old. His first stay was at Urambo in central Tanganyika. It took nearly six months just to get there, and as his fellow missionaries died around him, he survived, perhaps due to his short stature and stubborn character, but ill health caused his retreat back to Great Britain.

A decade later, in 1893, after serving as a pastor in Scotland, and then Brighton, England, Willoughby responded to a call from the London Missionary Society (LMS) to 'undertake a particularly difficult task at Palapye in Bechuanaland'.

Willoughby would discover that to be able to function he would have to learn Setswana. So he did, much to the surprise of the Batswana around him and those in the LMS who did not like him. Another demand made on him was that he become a 'doctor of medicine', so he accomplished that too, dispensing medicines every morning for two hours.

He also found that though he was a church builder and out to save souls for Christ, he was also operating in a 'Front-Line State' and that the enemy was Cecil Rhodes and his allies. He would serve to block Rhodes' vision of a British Empire extending from the Cape to Cairo. His first book was on these years, an illustrated volume, Native Life on the Transvaal Border (1900).

After 10 years in Palapye the Willoughbys moved to Serowe, following other great shifts in populations at that time. In 1903 they buried in the first European grave there Howard Poutney Willoughby, only 15 years -old and their first born son. In 1904 the Willoughbys were moved by the LMS to Tiger Kloof, near Vryburg in the Northern Cape, where he was to become the principal of a great school for the Bechuana and Africa, the 'London Missionary Society Native Institution' on 2,700 acres on the Cape to Cairo Railway.

Khama III was always annoyed that the LMS had chosen to build such an eminent institution outside of his territory. The Willoughby was to spend a difficult decade there and when he left for Molepolole at 56, he looked 66 (pages 94 to 148). His second book was called simply Tiger Kloof (1912). The Institute became known as the 'Hampton or Tuskegee for Bechuanaland'.

'Wheels Willoughby', as the students named him, was a controversial person. In London at LMS headquarters Bechuanaland missionaries were noted for their 'rugged individualism ... and had a long-standing reputation for 'in-fighting' and jealousy'. That Willoughby achieved as much as he did over those 10 years is remarkable given the amount of time he had to spend defending himself against ad hominem and other attacks. He was challenged as a person and for his policies on industrial training. Tiger Kloof was denounced by missionaries returning to London as a failure. He faced factions within the church, the Bechuana and the students. 'What is certain, the Willoughbys, man and wife, gave their all to bring Tiger Kloof into being. If the vision was large, and it was, their commitment to its realisation was even larger' (page 109). Allegations against Willoughby, when investigated, led to his exoneration. One famous incident surrounded the thrashing of Tengo Jabavu by a teacher and allegations that Willoughby said he would have killed him if he'd found him with his daughter Doris. The next principal said about Willoughby that he was 'nothing but generosity and kindness and self-effacement ... he was a fine, unselfish Christian, and yet [he] had alienated man after man from himself, so that his ability is praised but his name is not loved' (page 121).
Willoughby left Molepolole and Bechuanaland in February 1917, sailing for Australia. War was on and travel was difficult. In 1918 he participated in a deputation to Papua (north of Queensland) for the LMS visiting a dozen mission stations there. This would lead to his moving to Connecticut (US) where in 1919 he joined the Hartford Theological Seminary. There he was made a professor and founded the Africa Department in the Kennedy School of Missions, where he was to spend the next decade. 

Willoughby's next books were: Race Problems in the New Africa: a study of the Relation of Bantu and Britons in those parts of Bantu Africa which are under British Control (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923)-considered his major opus; The Soul of the Bantu: a Sympathetic Study of the Magico-Religious Practices and Beliefs of the Bantu Tribes of Africa (1928); and, Nature Worship and Taboo (1932).
E-mail: sheridangriswold@yahoo.com