Tyler, Josiah

1823-1895

Congregational

South Africa

Josiah Tyler was an American missionary to South Africa. Son of the president of Dartmouth College, Tyler was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. A graduate of Amherst College (1845) and East Windsor Theological Seminary (1848), he married Susan W. Clark on February 27, 1849, was ordained the next day, and sailed for South Africa a few weeks later under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The Tylers were just two of a larger number of notable recruits who sailed together for the Zulu mission in Natal and who helped bring about a period of rapid growth. Tyler was stationed for much of the time at Esidumbini, and his experiences are described in his book Forty Years among the Zulus (1891). During his last years in Africa his health was poor, but his zeal for the work was great. He was a notably effective missionary speaker, and a week before his death he delivered an address at the Congress on Africa held in Atlanta, Georgia.

David M. Stowe

Bibliography

Missionary Herald 92 (1896): 53-54 (obit.). Earlier indexed volumes contain many excerpts from his letters.

David Livingstone FRGS FRS (/ˈlɪvɪŋstən/; 19 March 1813 – 4 May 1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary[2] with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa, who wanted to abolish slavery;[3] one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era. David was the husband of Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century missionary family, Moffat.[4] Livingstone had a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion.

Livingstone's fame as an explorer and his obsession with learning the sources of the Nile River was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade. "The Nile sources", he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil." His subsequent exploration of the central African watershed was the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of Africa. At the same time, his missionary travels, "disappearance", and eventual death in Africa‍—‌and subsequent glorification as a posthumous national hero in 1874‍—‌led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European "Scramble for Africa".