UMCA

The Universities' Mission to Central Africa (c.1857 - 1965) was a missionary society established by members of the Anglican Church within the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and Dublin. It was firmly in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church, and the first to devolve authority to a bishop in the field rather than to a home committee. Founded in response to a plea by David Livingstone, the society established the mission stations that grew to be the bishoprics of Zanzibar and Nyasaland (later Malawi), and pioneered the training of black African priests.

The society's foundation was inspired by lectures that Livingstone gave on his return from Africa in 1857. Though named to reflect its university origins, from the outset it welcomed contributions from wellwishers unaffiliated to those institutions. The society had two major goals: to establish a mission presence in Central Africa, and to actively oppose the slave trade.

To advance these goals, it sought to send a mission led by a bishop into Central Africa; Charles Mackenzie was duly consecrated in 1860 and led an expedition in 1861 up the Zambezi into the Shire Highlands. This first expedition was more or less disastrous. The area chosen as a base, near Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi), proved highly malarial; Bishop Mackenzie died there of the disease on 31 January 1862, along with many local people and three others among the tiny missionary party. Early conversion efforts from this base yielded little result, and supplies ran out or were destroyed during a period of famine. The mission then withdrew from the area, abandoning the graves of the missionaries who had died there, and though it established a new presence in Zanzibar many years passed before it returned to Malawi. Bishop Tozer, Mackenzie's successor, deemed the mission's early years "a miserable failure".

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