Browsing by Author "Shell, Sandra Rowoldt"

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    From slavery to freedom : the Oromo slave children of Lovedale, prosopography and profiles.
    (2013) Shell, Sandra Rowoldt; Saunders, Christopher
    In 1888, eighty years after Britain ended its oceanic slave trade, a British warship liberated a consignment of Oromo child slaves in the Red Sea and took them to Aden. A year later, a further group of liberated Oromo slave children joined them at a Free Church of Scotland mission at Sheikh Othman, just north of Aden. When a number of the children died within a short space of time, the missionaries had to decide on a healthier institution for their care. After medical treatment and a further year of recuperation, the missionaries shipped sixty-four Oromo children to Lovedale Institution in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. From 1890, Lovedale baptised the children into the Christian faith, taught them and trained them. By 1910, approximately one third had died, one third had settled in the Cape of Good Hope, one third had returned to Ethiopia and one had headed for the United States. The present study is a cohort-based, longitudinal prosopography of this group of Oromo slave children, based on the core documentation of the children’s own first passage accounts, supplemented by numerous and varied independent primary sources.
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    A missionary life among the amaXhosa : the Eastern Cape journals of James Laing, 1830-1836
    (2006) Shell, Sandra Rowoldt; Saunders, Christopher
    This thesis is a critical edition of a section of the journals of the Reverend James Laing of the Glasgow Missionary Society. The first scholarly study of the Laing journals, this thesis seeks to contribute towards a new understanding of the early days of transcultural interchange on the Eastern Cape frontier. The only previous published work on Laing is William Govan's hagiographical Memorials of the Missionary Career of the Rev. James Laing, Missionary of the Free Church of Scotland in Kaffi'aria published in Glasgow by David Bryce and Son in 1875. This thesis attempts to make Laing's text as accessible to today's readers as possible. To this end, the text is a faithful transcription of the original, augmented by a contextual introduction, detailed footnotes and a comprehensive index. James Laing was born on 6 September 1803 and was raised in the Scottish Lowlands. He read classics, philosophy, theology and a range of medical subjects at Edinburgh University where he enrolled in 1822. The Glasgow Missionary Society assigned Laing to Burnshill Mission on the Eastern Cape frontier. He sailed for the Cape on 11 October 1830. From that day, he kept a journal almost without break, until a week before his death. Laing's journals comprise four bound volumes and more than two thousand pages in toto. These are housed in the Cory Library for Historical Research, Rhodes University as part of the Lovedale Institution Collection. Laing's journal constitutes a major element in the small body of extant Glasgow Missionary Society records. It was decided to edit, for this thesis, the first portion of the journals only.