Livingstonia
BY Toccoa Switzer

“How many people do you serve here?” I asked the one and only doctor on staff.

“Our catchment population is approximately 100,000 people,” she said. “But we also serve an additional 30,000 when we count the overflow from the north and the ones that come from Zambia.”

“They come all the way from Zambia?” I asked.

“I guess the word has gotten out that our service is reliable.”

“How do they get here?”

She shrugged. “Many of them walk.”

I pictured the worried young mother slogging along the washed-out roads with her sick baby strapped to her back. How many hours or how many days had she spent walking in the mud and the rain?

That night at Embangweni we stayed in the Donald Fraser Guest House, named for another Scottish missionary. Although it was a simple, sparsely decorated building, it might as well have been a Ritz Carlton. I had access to a working toilet, a warm shower and food that was prepared with boiled water. I also slept under a mosquito net in a bed with freshly laundered sheets. While eating breakfast one morning, I asked our hosts about Reverend Donald Fraser and his wife, Agnes, a physician.

Livingstonia
BY Toccoa Switzer

I learned the Frasers moved to Embangweni in 1902 where they established Loudon Station, a satellite post for the Livingstonia medical mission. For more than twenty years, the couple lived and worked among the Ngoni, a tribe that had migrated northward from an area south of the Zambesi River.

In Donald Fraser of Livingstonia, Agnes Fraser gives a detailed account of her husband’s missionary work in Nysaland, as Malawi was called in those days. Each year, he organized large sacramental conventions or unganos. Thousands traveled great distances for these spiritual gatherings where hundreds of adults and children were baptized and even more took communion.

Although they centered around the preaching of the Holy Gospel, the revivals also included plenty of pomp and show. Hymn singing, clapping and dancing were all part of the week-long celebrations. In his lecture on the centennial anniversary of Loudon Station, Dr. Jack Thompson, Divinity Professor of the University of Edinburgh, said Fraser based the conventions on the communion season of Scottish highland tradition, noting their similarities to the services Fraser’s own father led in Argyllshire.

But Thompson also draws parallels to the Incwala, the first fruits ceremony, a traditional African festival where a tribe comes together to celebrate the rebirth of their king and their kingdom. In many ways, Fraser’s conventions allowed the Ngoni to ease into Christianity without turning their backs on their heritage and customs.