Africana;

First edition of this important account of Malawi, from the celebrated travel collection of Franklin Brooke-Hitching, with his pencilled initials to the half-titles

Macdonald (1850-1929) arrived in the Shire Highlands in July 1878 as the first ordained minister of the newly-established Church of Scotland mission at Blantyre. During his tenure the mission assumed control of what Macdonald himself referred to as 'civil jurisdiction', and became implicated in numerous abuses, including routine corporal punishment of locals, and the large-scale expropriation of land 'partly to forestall Portuguese claims to the sovereignty of the Shire Highlands' (Morris, An Environmental History of Southern Malawi, p. 53). Macdonald and others were recalled by the Foreign Mission Committee in 1881, and he spent the rest of his life as a parish minister. Despite the circumstances of his tenure, considered disreputable even by the standards of the day, his account is considered a 'pioneer ethnographic study of the (ibid.) in a remarkably sympathetic vein.