The Soul of the Bantu

An ex library octavo (170mm x 234mm) hardcover book in the original gray cloth covers with gilt titles on a brown label to the spine, gilt lines together with a blind embossed torch to the front cover. Sixteen preliminary plus 476 pages of text, including an index and references cited. The upper part of the spine and front cover are somewhat rubbed. The book is otherwise tightly bound, clean, free of library stamps except for one number on the verso of the title page, free of foxing or browning and nice square corners. Black end-papers.

William Charles Willoughby (1857-1938) was born at Redruth, Cornwall, England in 1857. He studied Theology at Spring Hill Theological College and was appointed, by the London Missionary Society (LMS), to central Africa. He was ordained as a Congregational minister in 1882 but returned home with malaria in 1883. After further study and marrying Charlotte Elizabeth Pountney, he was appointed LMS missionary to the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana), in 1892. In 1893 he accompanied Paramount Chief Khama and other chiefs to England, to help them oppose Cecil Rhodes’s demands for administrative rights over the Protectorate. After a long and active career as a Missionary he retired to England in 1931. He was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He wrote this present book to explain the magico-religious practices and beliefs of the Bantu-speaking peoples and their veneration of Ancestor worship.