Tiyo Soga

Tiyo Soga was born in 1829 in the Tyhume valley near Alice, in the Eastern Cape — son of Old Soga, a leading councillor to the Ngqika chiefs, and of Nosuthu, his great wife, an early Christian. Lovedale took him on scholarship from 1844 until war interrupted; Scotland followed twice — first in 1846 with Lovedale's head William Govan for teacher training, then from 1851 at Glasgow University, its first Black South African student, and the United Presbyterian Divinity Hall.

In December 1856, at Glasgow, he was licensed and ordained — the first Black South African ordained as a Christian minister. Two months later he married Janet Burnside of Scotland, a union of eight children and one of the earliest documented marriages across that line in his world, and in 1857 they sailed home into the ash of the cattle-killing years. He built the Mgwali mission from 1857, and from 1868 carried the work deeper, to Tutura in the Transkei.

His pen served as long as his voice. He translated Pilgrim's Progress into Xhosa — uHambo lomHambi, published at Lovedale in 1867, its second part finished after him by his son — labored on the Xhosa scriptures, and wrote some thirty-one hymns, among them "Lizalis' idinga lakho," which opened the founding meeting of the congress that became the ANC in 1912 and is sung to this day. In the journal Indaba he wrote as "the Dove of the Nation," and for his sons he set down The Inheritance of My Children — "never appear ashamed... you inherit African blood" — a text historians read as a founding stone of Black consciousness.

Tuberculosis took him at Tutura on the twelfth of August 1871, at about forty-two. His children carried the charge onward — ministers and a historian of the Xhosa, an editor in the Congress's founding milieu, the first Black South African veterinary surgeon. Honored be Tiyo Soga, who carried the Word both ways across the water and told his sons to be ashamed of nothing.