From Molepolole I travelled south in the ox-waggon to Mahatelo on my way to Kanye. Early next morning I was met at Gamoshupa by a cart and four mules, kindly sent for me by Seapapico, the Chief of the Bangwaketsi tribe. After a drive through beautiful scenery I reached Kanye, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, and the capital of the tribe, in the afternoon. I spent the greater part of a week at this station, where missionary work has been carried on under the superintendence of a resident missionary for forty years, and where Mr. and Mrs. Howard Williams were labouring. While this book is passing through the press a cablegram has been received, conveying the sad news that Mr. Williams has been called to the higher service, after a devoted missionary life of well-nigh thirty years. The increasing activities of a growing Church of nearly 700 members were apparent in the town itself and in the numerous outstations in the district. On the Sunday the spacious Church, which was provided by the tribe and cost £3,000 apart from the bricks, and contains a fine organ, the gift of the late Chief Bathoen, was packed to its utmost capacity, many having come in from the outstations. The women’s head-dresses, which were of all the colours of the rainbow, were in striking contrast to the black heads of the men. After the service thirty-four adults were baptised, and in the afternoon a Communion Service was held, at which 550 Church members gathered round the table of our Lord. On the following days I attended meetings of Church members and Christian workers and of women, inspected the schools, and had interviews with some of the leading men.
The present Chief, Seapapico, is a young man of twenty-six, and the son of Bathoen, who accompanied Khama to England in 1895. The young man was educated at Lovedale, and speaks English well, and was a great support to the missionary, Mr. Howard Williams. His mother, Bathoen’s widow, is a fine Christian woman and gives great assistance to Mrs. Williams in her work amongst the women of the tribe. She was the favourite daughter of Sechele, the old Chief of the Bakwena tribe. When she was a girl she had a quarrel with a friend and destroyed her eyesight with a thorn. Sechele had one of his daughter’s eyes put out, on the principle of “an eye for an eye,” and she bears the mark of this parental correction to this day.
From Kanye I was driven in the Chief’s cart to the railway at Lobatsi, whence on the following day I was escorted by the native ordained minister, Roger K. Mokadi, to his station at Maanwane, over the Transvaal border. After a service in the Church and a visit to Roger’s kraal, a hot tramp under a fierce sun brought us at Mabotsa to the ruins of the old Mission house built by Livingstone and Edwards. Some of the walls were standing seven or eight feet high, but the interior was overgrown with bush. Close by is the hill where Livingstone had his famous encounter with the lion, and near at hand an old native Christian lives who was with Livingstone at the time. A drive through Linokani, where the German Lutherans are carrying on a fine piece of missionary work, brought me to Zeerust and next day by means of the train I reached Johannesburg. It does not fall within the scope of this book to describe this wonderful city, the creation of the last twenty-five years. It is by far the largest business town in South Africa and is the centre of the greatest gold producing mines in the world. Here I experienced the utmost kindness from members of the Congregational Church and met my colleague, Mr. Houghton, with whom I was to travel for the next nine months. Nor must I stay to refer to a deeply interesting visit to Pretoria. At these great centres the evidence of the appalling racial conflict, which constitutes the greatest problem confronting the Christian Church in South Africa to-day, was abundantly apparent.
A few days later I travelled to Mafeking, for ever immortalised for its heroic defence during the Boer war, to see Colonel Panzera, the Resident Commissioner for the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and thence proceeded to Tiger Kloof to meet all the Society’s South African missionaries for consultation upon the work and its problems.
Throughout my journeys amongst the Churches in Bechuanaland and Matebeleland there were many signs of the growing power and promise of the Native South African Church. That Church, planted first by Moffat and his colleagues at Kuruman, and carried north by Livingstone and his successors until it has well-nigh reached the Zambesi, has had a chequered career, but its progress has been unmistakably onward and upward. It has been tried and purified by the struggles of the past, and to-day its “far-flung battle line” is making a steady advance against the forces of superstition and heathenism with which it is confronted.
“Climbing through darkness up to God,” the members of that Church are bravely carrying “the wonder and the glory of the light” into “the darkness and the sorrow of the night” in which so many of their fellow-countrymen are still enshrouded. Through the open doors “the true Light, which lighteth every man coming into the world,” is pouring its ever-brightening rays.
CHAPTER III
Tiger Kloof—“A Lamp Shining in a Dark Place”
From North, and South, and East, and West
They come.
John Oxenham.
The crown of the work of the L. M. S. in South Africa is the Tiger Kloof Native Institution. Ten years ago the site on which its buildings now stand was bare veldt. To-day it is a centre of light for all the L. M. S. work in South Africa. Situated on the Cape-to-Cairo Railway, 767 miles north of Cape Town, the Institution buildings, which challenge the attention of every passing traveller, are a monument to the princely munificence of that great missionary-hearted man Robert Arthington of Leeds, to the energy, ability, devotion and far-seeing statesmanship of the Rev. W. C. Willoughby, and to what can be accomplished by the South African boys trained in the Institution, who have erected most of the buildings which are now so notable a feature of the landscape.[3]
It is to Tiger Kloof that the brightest and best boys, who have received their early training at the Mission stations of the Society in South Africa, are sent to complete their education. It is from Tiger Kloof that the teachers and preachers, who are to be God’s instruments in building up the growing Native Church, proceed after receiving training to fit them for their work. Tiger Kloof is the strategic centre of the Society’s work in South Africa. In the coming days it will also be the training place for teachers and preachers connected with the Central Africa Mission.