MY PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS

My grandfather, known as Grandpa Swazi.

From his earliest days he was a man of vision and drive. He had an all-consuming passion to present the Gospel but also to enable men to keep themselves, to shun idleness. He was the only missionary I know who sought to make the mission self-sufficient. Many, in what was then Nyasaland, and later Swaziland have him to thank for building and woodwork skills.

My grandmother tells the story of Grandpa Swazi climbing onto his desk at school, to declare he was going to be a missionary in Africa and this he was till his dying day. I now so wish I could have appreciated his preaching. When I got to know him, he was separated from his beloved Africa of the wilds and soon afterwards the flame of his life was extinguished.

He went out to Africa with the Zambezi Industrial Mission, keen to teach handcraft skills but his first concern was to bring the people knowledge of God. His first declaration of the Gospel on African soil was unique. Rushing ashore, his zeal to speak the language of the African people expressed itself in the words ‘Do you love God?’ Apparently there was an error in his words, but not in his zeal. To me, it reveals that he wanted all men to share his love for his saviour.

He was a great story-teller, my mother tells me. This was an art he used in visiting schools in rural Africa, taking the gospel to faraway villages. He relates how he was called to the hut of a dying African woman and told her ‘the old, old story of Jesus and His love’. Months later, when in the vicinity of her village, he was told that she died, declaring that she wanted no ancestor worship at her funeral as Jesus was her Saviour. Fruit indeed in a pagan culture where so many syncretise the old with the new out of fear of ancestor spirits.

He had a great respect for education having had little himself. He ensured that his sons had every possibility of furthering their education and to good effect. They each continued to the top of their professions, equally good with their hands as well as their heads, emulating his creativity as well as his tireless efforts to do good.

My grandfather built pleasing houses as well as churches, making furniture as well as assembling useful technologies to improve their lives. A radio as well as an electricity generator, cars as well as motorcycles.

He was a mastercraftsman in woodwork, stone, stories and men's souls.

Not making much of it , both grandparents received MBE’s for their service as pioneering missionaries. There is a picture of my grandmother, sitting next to the Swazi queen mother, one of many whom she taught to crochet.

Grandma Swazi

She trained as a nurse, and then as a midwife in Glasgow. Even then she wanted to care for black babies. There was a possibility that she may have gone to India, but it was Africa which drew her. She was sent out as a missionary with the Church of Scotland in the early 1900’s.

She had a great pride in her Scottish roots and retained a love of her homeland. Some of this she passed on to me, together with an abiding interest in the medical profession. She loved chatting and how I wished I had listened more closely. Perhaps it was her isolation from good conversation which made her so eager to speak at length when with friends and family. She had a prodigious correspondence with many friends and acquaintances all over the world. When my parents went on holiday they never told her where they were going as she always knew someone whom she thought they could visit!

My grand mother was said to be a wonderful homemaker, starting all over again in a new country at the age of fifty. Tribute was paid to her by the elders of the church in Swaziland, who recognised that she did much to make her husband and their pastor, happy. My father realised something of the pain she must have had when separated from her children in their early years, so far and for so long.