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[Album of photographs documenting the American Board Mission to the Zulu people.]

Province of Natal, South Africa, [ca. 1899–1903]. Sm 4to (10” x 8”) three quarters black leather and blue pebbled cloth over boards, gilt stripes at leather edges. 58 original photos, of which 18 are approx. 5.75” x 8”, 39 are 4.5” x 6” to 2.25” x 3.25”, and 3 are mounted on paperboard. Most photos are captioned in ink (a few in pencil), and the largest mounted photo (5.125” x 7.825”) is inscribed in ink on verso of mount: “Greetings in the Lord to Elder G[?] W[?] from the Bunker Family. Christmas 1899…Natal—The ‘Christmas Land.’” CONDITION: Album good, wear to extremities, 2 leaves detached, some pages chipped at margins; photos overall very good with mostly rich tonality.

A fascinating album documenting life at several missionary stations of the Zulu branch established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Among the mission stations pictured here are Umzumbe and Inanda, both of which were home to two of the earliest girls’ schools established by the American Zulu Mission. At least two shots show the Inanda school building; another shows several women hanging clothes at the “Inanda laundry”; and another captures three Inanda teachers—“Miss [Fidelia] Phelps [the principal], Mrs. [Isabel “Belle”] Bunker, Mrs. [Florence A.] Dorwood [Dorward]”—posed closely together, a hand bell visible on a tree branch behind them. Photos from the Umzumbe Home, as the school was called, show a hillside traversed by lines of “U[m]zumbe Girls carrying water,” as well as a group portrait of over eighty “U[m]zumbe mission girls.” It is not clear who compiled this album, though evidently it was someone with the opportunity to travel throughout the Zulu Mission: the majority of album contents are broader in scope, showing sites, scenes, and people of interest from around the region. One photo shows “Rev. D. Russell, Jno L. Dube”—both standing—“and a heathen,” squatting. John Langalibalele Dube (1871–1946) studied at Oberlin College in the late 1880s, and went on to found a school in Natal modeled after the Tuskegee Institute in the 1890s, become a distinguished author, and serve as the founding president of the South African Native National Congress. He was the grandson of Dalitha, the first woman to convert at the Inanda station, and the son of Rev. James Dube, a minor Zulu chief of the AmaQadi tribe and one of the first native ministers ordained by the American Zulu Mission. Other images show a group gathered at Esidumbini (another station); the coastal city of Durban; the “Trunks of the Umtombi tree where Dr. Adams preached to 800 Zulus”; the enormous “rock at Esidumbin [sic], Natal, South Africa”; two young Zulu women reading books; another in a white dress blowing a horn; a white missionary repairing shoes, surrounded by three young Zulu boys; a crowd gathered under a tree, some in western and others in traditional clothing, evidently to hear a white-clad missionary and a younger companion preach; a row of seven “Zulu ministers at the ministerial meeting”—whose western garb contrasts with the more traditionally clad group of eleven “Zulu men”; a Zulu woman in western clothes (captioned “A Christian woman”); several “Zulu policemen,” and more. Numerous white missionaries appear throughout, and several Black individuals are identified with first names in captions.

Although there had been missionary activity in the region since the 1830s, it was not until British annexation of Natal that stations were securely established and Christianization began to gain traction. By the end of the century, however, the colony of Natal “possessed one of the densest networks of mission stations worldwide” (Pribyl). The Umzumbe station was founded in 1861 by American missionaries Elijah and Addie Robbins, but by 1869 had been taken over by Henry and Laura Bridgman, who would oversee operations for some thirty years before passing the reigns to their daughter and son-in-law, Laura Bridgman Cowles and George Cowles, in 1904. The girls’ school there opened in 1873 and closed in 1919. The mission station at Inanda was established in 1847 by Daniel and Lucy Lindley, and the female seminary—now an elite girls’ school, and one of the oldest in South Africa—was founded in 1869. The Esidumbini station was founded in 1849, which for many years was led by Josiah Tyler and his wife Susan W. Clark. Their work is documented in Tyler’s Forty Years among the Zulus (1891). A mounted photograph accompanying the volume is inscribed, on Christmas 1899, “from the Bunker Family.” Rev. Fred Robert Bunker (1859–1946) and Isabel “Belle” Richards married in Olivet, Michigan in January, 1891, and arrived in Durban on March 26th of the same year. They transferred from the East Central African Mission to the Zulu Mission in 1897. Fred and Belle had five children—a daughter and four sons—the eldest of whom was born in 1895.

A rich photographic record of the missionary scene in Natal, South Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century as documented by American missionaries.

REFERENCES: Pribyl, Kathleen, et al. “The Role of Drought in Agrarian Crisis and Social Change: The Famine of the 1890s in South-Eastern Africa,” Regional Environmental Change Vol. 19 (2019), p. 2683; “John Langalibalele Dube” at South African History Online.

Item #9051

Price: $2,500.00

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