Soga, John Henderson. Xhosa missionary and writer. Emgwali 1860 – Southampton March 1941.

The second son of Tiyo Soga and his wife, Janet Burnside, he was named after his father’s benefactor in Scotland. From early youth he was lame in one leg. In 1870 he and two of his brothers were sent to Scotland to be educated. He studied at the University of Glasgow and completed his theological training at the United Presbyterian Divinity Hall, Edinburgh. After marrying Isabel Brown, he returned to work as a missionary in the Mount Frere district and in 1888 succeeded his brother, Dr WA Soga at the Miller mission station near Elliotdale, Bomvanaland. With contributions received from both Bantu and White people he built a church in which he held services for both.

After nearly fifty years of devoted service, he retired in 1936 and both races took leave of him with great regret. On his retirement he donated a journal of his father’s to the Fort Hare museum. He was well known as a writer. He completed his father’s translation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, publishing the second part in 1929. He then wrote three important works on the Bantu: The South-Easter Bantu (1930), The Ama-Xosa; life and customs (1931) and Bantu literature and life (1955). Seven of his songs and eight tunes have been included in the Xhosa Presbyterian hymnal. After retiring he went to England where he, his wife and their son William were killed during a German air-raid. AE DU TOIT

Soga, Tiyo. Missionary; first Bantu ordained minister. Tyume 1829 – Tutura mission (Butterworth) 12.8.1871.

The son of Soga, one of Chief Gaika’s councilors, his mother, an early convert to Christianity, sent him, a promising pupil, first to the local (Emgwali) mission school and in 1844 to Lovedale, whence the principal, William Govan, soon took Tiyo to Scotland. Tiyo went to school at Inchinnan and afterwards attended the Free Church Normal Seminary in Glasgow until 1848. He returned to South Africa as a catechist, but went back to Scotland in 1851, entering Glasgow University and then, in 1852, the theological hall of the United Presbyterian Church at Edinburgh. He qualified as a minister of that church in Glasgow in 1856, married a Scotswoman, Janet Burnside, in 1857 and returned to South Africa in July, working first at Peelton, a station of London Missionary Society. Shortly afterwards he founded the Presbyterian mission at Emgwali outside Sttuterheim (see The History of Mgwali). At these centres his main work was aiding and reorganizing the remnants of the Gaika tribe after their sufferings in the cattle-killing delusion of 1857.

In 1866 ill-health necessitated a temporary halt to Soga’s ministry, but gave him the chance to complete and publish a Xhosa translation of the first part of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, still one of the main achievements in the Xhosa language. As a member from 1868 of a board for revising the Xhosa Bible, he made a second notable contribution to Xhosa literature. When the paramount chief, Kreli, asked for missionaries to be sent to his territory. Soga left Emgwali and founded in 1867 the Tutura mission, which is still an important educational and evangelical centre. JW MACQUARRIE