John Philip (missionary)

John Philip ( born April 14, 1775 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, † August 27 1851 in South Africa) was a Scottish missionary, civil rights activist and director of the London Missionary Society (LMS).

Life

John Philip was the son of a Scottish teacher. After training as a cloth merchant, he worked as an accountant in Dundee and then attended the Wesleyan Theological College in Hoxton. In 1804 he was appointed pastor of a Kongregationalistengemeinde in Aberdeen. In 1822 he was seconded as director of the LMS along with his Scottish colleague John Campbell on a mission to South Africa. As superintendent, he was there to re-organize and monitor the work of the LMS. There, Philip committed for the landless laborers, the Khoi, who served the white farmers and traders as cheap labor. After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in South Africa, he started a campaign " for equal civil rights for all subjects of His Majesty ", to improve the minimum civil rights for freed slaves on. Philip was committed to the preservation of the adjacent to the Cape Colony Small States of the Xhosa, Sotho and Griqua indigenous and their interests. Philip incurred the hatred of many compatriots when he made responsible for a border war before a parliamentary committee in London, both the British authorities and the white settlers. Philips life was influenced by the conviction that the gospel should change people and societies. After his death in 1851 he was buried in a cemetery in a township. Philip is regarded as the founding father of liberalism in South Africa.

Works

• Researches in South Africa: Illustrating the Civil, Moral, and Religious Condition of the Native Tribes. Adamant Media Corporation, 2004, ISBN 978-1421264561