In my book Utterly Immoral I write about Robert Keable’s time in Zanzibar before the First World War. Keable’s first job after he was ordained a priest was to join the Universities Mission to Central Africa. While at Cambridge, and as a curate in Bradford, Keable had worked hard to raise both the profile of, and money for, the mission. At the end of 1911, aged 24 he travelled out to Zanzibar having been appointed as a mission priest as well as a tutor and Vice Principal of St. Andrew’s College.

Why was the UMCA in Zanzibar

What has always intrigued me is why the Universities Mission to Central Africa was based in Zanzibar, an island on the east coast of Africa. Keable in his first published book, Darkness or Light, a history of both Zanzibar and the Universities Mission, explained how the intention had originally been to set the mission in what is now Malawi.

The UMCA owed its existence to David Livingstone who travelled and worked in Africa from 1841 to 1856, setting up a number of missions. He returned to England for two years during which time he wrote his book Missionary Travels in South Africa and toured the country pleading for more missions. Taking up Livingstone’s call Charles Frederick Mackenzie was made leader of the Universities Mission to Central Africa, at the Great Zambesi Meeting, in 1859. The Mission plan, to establish an English village in Africa, was quickly supported by four universities Oxford, Cambridge,.Dublin and Durham.

The first attempt to set up a village was at Magomero, in what is now southern Malawi, with a small group including a bishop, clergyman, doctor, lay superintendent, shoemaker, carpenter and an agricultural labourer. But that proved an ill-fated effort. Keable describes in detail how the mission faced the challenge of hunger, local wars and the slave trade. Ultimately however the biggest obstacle was disease and within a year malaria had killed the bishop and most of the missionaries. Bishop Tozer was asked to take over the mission but quickly realised the mission in the centre of Africa way up the Zambesi was ‘in every way a miserable failure, and the selection of it for English missionary work can only be due to the blindest enthusiasm’. The bishop decided to relocate, and he set sail for Zanzibar, arriving on September 1^st 1864. He chose Zanzibar because:

It was the capital of East Africa and the centre of a hundred trade-routes; the island itself was much more open to European communication than the Zambesi, and there was a British Resident there; …the Swahili language spoken there was a passport to many tribes… work lay ready to hand nearer stores and the sea; and above all was a starting-place from which they could commit their future way.

So, the new base for the Mission was in Zanzibar– a small island (just 48 miles long and 22 miles wide) off Africa – where there was already a French mission in town and a good splattering of Christians – Catholics from America, Lutherans from Germany and Presbyterians from Scotland.  Instead of building a village they rented a large white stone building with open cloisters on the first floor from the Sultan.

Early work of the mission

The Sultan gave the bishop five slave boys and two of the missionaries became teachers. Slowly the school numbers rose thanks mainly to the rescuing of slaves from slave ships. The following year the bishop and his sister, who had joined him, were given nine girls and five boys rescued from a northern Arab Dhow packed with 300 slaves, and fifty Arabs with long spears and guns, which sailors in the boats of HMS Wasp managed to rescue. By December 1868 there were 55 children in the school, taught all day by Dr Steere and Miss Jones but allowed a walk in the evening and then encouraged to play either football – a sport the mission introduced to the island – or rounders.

Once the school was up and running the bishop sought a site for a missionary college and St. Andrew’s College, where Keable worked, was built.

By 1911, when Keable arrived in Zanzibar, it was a British protectorate. Following the abolition of slavery, the Sultan of Oman had begun to lose control and the Heligoland-Zanzibar deal between Germany and Britain followed by the shortest war in history – the 45-minute Anglo-Zanzibar war – saw Britain gain control. The Mission had built a church and expanded its work to the mainland of Tanzania and beyond.

Keable only stayed a year with the UMCA. He had returned to England at the beginning of 1914 and following the outbreak of the war he left the organisation.

Although the UMCA set up new bases in what are now Malawi, mainland Tanzania and Zambia it continued to work out of Zanzibar throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In 1965 it merged with another High Church missionary organisation the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts to form the USPG. That charity has had a number of reincarnations but is now called the United Society Partners in the Gospel.  

There is no doubt that the UMCA did some really good work in East Africa not least in raising concern in Europe about slavery in the region. Today the main criticism is that it perpetuated the paternalistic attitude of the Church towards Africans, a problem which Keable highlighted in a couple of essays in 1918 – African Priests in France and The Worth of an African.