Alexander Hetherwick was a Church of Scotland missionary in Malawi. He graduated from Aberdeen University, the best mathematician of his class. He turned away from an academic career and trained for the Church of Scotland ministry. In 1885 he was ordained for missionary service with the Blantyre mission in Malawi, where D. C. Scott sent him to open up new work among hitherto hostile groups beneath the Zomba plateau. Although very different temperamentally from Scott, Hetherwick soon became Scott’s principal assistant and succeeded him as head of the mission in 1898. Hetherwick was an able linguist and chaired the committee that produced the complete Nyanja Bible, which was used until the late 1970s in Malawi, Zambia, and parts of Mozambique. Following in Scott’s footsteps, he never flinched from challenging the colonial authorities over African rights and served as representative of those interests in the legislative council of the Protectorate from 1908 to 1913 and again from 1922 to 1925. His speeches before the government commission of enquiry into the John Chilembwe rebellion of 1915 were, for the time, a startling insistence on the oneness of humanity transcending racial difference. Along with Robert Laws, he was one of the main architects of the autonomous Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, which was inaugurated in 1924.

Andrew C. Ross

Bibliography

Hetherwick, as well as producing a new edition of D. C. Scott’s Cyclopediac Dictionary of the Cimang’anja Language, wrote Robert Hellier Napier (1926) and The Gospel and the African (1932). In 1931, W.P. Livingstone produced Hetherwick’s biography, A Prince of Missionaries.

This article is reproduced, with permission, from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, copyright © 1998, by Gerald H. Anderson, W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved.