Tiyo Soga
1829-1871 19th century
Standing straight between two worlds that each claim all of you.
Who was Tiyo Soga?
The son of a councillor to the Xhosa chief Ngqika, he studied in Glasgow and in 1856 became the first ordained black South African minister. He translated Pilgrim's Progress into Xhosa, wrote hymns, founded missions on the Tyhume and then the Mgwali, and kept a journal in which a man divided between two worlds can be read, married to a Scotswoman, contested on both sides, often discouraged. He died of tuberculosis at forty-two.
In their own words
My faith in civilisation alone, if it does not follow in the wake of Christianity, is gone. The civilisation of civilised men, who care nothing, and do nothing, for the moral, physical, and intellectual improvement of ignorant men in barbarous countries, with whom they come into contact, is destructive.
There is scarcely any place or situation in which incidents do not occur, that remind us very strikingly that here we have no abiding city, and that in the midst of life we are in the midst of death. The dark shadow of death, like the shadow of our own bodies follows us whither we would go.
I have sometime great regrets that I ever went to Scotland and entered the ministry. Not alone for its trials here but for its solemn responsibilities.
It is every whit as good and as pure as that which flows in the veins of my fairer brethren.