Visions for Racial Equality: David Clement Scott and the Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century Malawi by Harri Englund

Though he admits at the outset that writing this book “took me to archives and other sources unfamiliar to me from my previous research,” Englund crafts a masterfully interwoven biography of an often-neglected visionary in Malawi’s past (xiii). David Clement Scott emerges from this account as “a radical missionary” championing a “doctrine of humanity” encompassing Africans and Europeans in a single community rather than as merely the beleaguered late nineteenth-century head of the Church of Scotland’s Blantyre Mission depicted in many other historical accounts (110).¹ Englund has assiduously embraced the historian’s task, taking great pains to locate scraps of Scott’s thought in letters and now little-read magazines—“Scott’s family had destroyed his personal papers”—scouring archives in Scotland, England, and Africa. He even visited collections of the Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian (ccap), in Malawi, which he found “in disrepair … [and] at varying stages...