I’m pleased to let you know that the Library now has access to Tanzania and Malawi in records from colonial missionaries, 1857-1965 from British Online Archives. This database gives you access to 54,550 digital pages from the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) archives including correspondence, journals, magazines, books, reports, etc.

You can access Tanzania and Malawi in records from colonial missionaries, 1857-1965 via the Databases A-Z list, the Digital primary source and archive collections guide or the African Studies databases list. You can also access it via DiscoverEd.

The UMCA was founded in the late 1850s, after the return of Dr David Livingstone from the region in 1857. This high church Anglican society drew its missionaries initially from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Dublin. Under its motto “A servant of servants”, from its main centres of Zanzibar and Nyasaland (now Malawi), the UMCA began from an early date opposing the slave trade and promoting the education of the indigenous people and the training and ordination of African priests.

Screenshot from ‘New Testament and Book of Common Prayer in Swahili, with a Decree Against Slavery’.

The collection includes missionaries’ correspondence and journals, volumes 1-82 (1883-1964) of the UMCA’s illustrated monthly magazine Central Africa, as well as miscellaneous correspondence, books, press cuttings and reports.

You can access Tanzania and Malawi in records from colonial missionaries, 1857-1965 via the Databases A-Z list, the Digital primary source and archive collections guide or the African Studies databases list. You can also access it via DiscoverEd.

The Library has access to a large number of digitised primary source and archive databases, you can find these on the Primary Sources database list.

Access is only available to current students and staff at the University of Edinburgh.

Caroline Stirling – Academic Support Librarian for School of Social and Political Science