Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission fieldYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
History
Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission field
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Missionaries
could earn the requisite amount of cows to satisfy her father.
Mr. Robertson was always called the umfundisi, or teacher. He held his
Sunday Kaffir service in a clearing in the bush, and gained many hearts
to himself, and some souls for the Church, while toiling with his hands
as well as setting forth the truth with his lips. Mrs. Robertson at the
same time worked upon the women by her tenderness to their little ones,
offering them little frocks if they would wash them, caressing them with
all a woman's true love for babies, and then training their elder
children and girls, teaching them needlework, and whatever could lead to
aspirations towards modesty and the other graces of Christian womanhood.
Often extremely ill, always fragile, her energy never failed; and there
was a grace and dignity about her whole deportment and manner which
caused "the Lady" to be the emphatic title always given to her by her
husband and his friends. Of these the Mackenzie family were among the
warmest, and the Archdeacon gladly gave valuable assistance to Mr.
Robertson by supplementing an education which had not been definitely
clerical, but rather of that order which seems to render an able Scotsman
fit to apply himself to almost anything.
In February 1857 another sister, named Alice, joined the Mackenzie
family, when they were on a visit to the Umlazi station. Her quick
powers and enthusiastic spirit fitted her in a wonderful manner for
missionary labour, and she was at once in such sympathy with the Kaffirs
that it was a playful arrangement among the home party that Anne should
be the white and Alice the black sister.
Just after her arrival, it was determined that the Archdeacon should
leave Durban, where, indeed, he had been only filling the post of an
absent clergyman, and take a district on the Umhlali river, forty miles
from Durban, containing a number of English settlements, a camp, and a
large amount of Kaffir kraals. Every Sunday he had five services at
different places, one of them eighteen miles from the nearest, a space
that had to be ridden at speed in the mid-day sun. There was no house,
but a couple of rooms with perpendicular sides and a verandah, one for
chapel, the other for sitting-room, while Kaffir beehive huts were the
bedrooms of all. For a long time blankets and plaids did the part of
doors and shutters; and just as the accommodations were improving, the
whole grass and wattle structure was burnt down, and it was many months
before the tardy labour of colonial workmen enabled the family to take
possession of the new house, in a better situation, which they named
Seaforth, after the title of the former head of the Mackenzie clan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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