This was the question that I posed in my paper at last week’s ecotheology conference at Liwonde. The subject of my question is John Buchanan, one of the very first missionaries to come to Malawi. The prompt for the paper is that we were asked to show how our particular disciplines could contribute to the construction of the kind of ecotheology that we need to meet our contemporary environmental crisis. In my case, I was challenged to do some church history.
Buchanan is a controversial character in Malawi’s history, almost a Jekyll and Hyde character. He was a central figure in the advent of Christianity, especially in the Zomba area. He spent his entire adult life in Malawi and passionately identified himself with the country. On the other hand, he was dismissed by Blantyre Mission for his involvement in the infliction of violent punishments on alleged offenders; and he went on to become a major figure in the establishment of colonial rule and settler plantations in Malawi.
What I found to be missing in most of the literature is an appreciation of Buchanan’s role as an environmentalist. He was only 21 years of age when he arrived in Malawi, but he had already gone through formative experiences that would shape his entire career. As a young man he underwent an evangelical conversion and trained as a gardener. The rest of his life revolved around his faith and his gardening.
In 1885, when he took account of his first nine years in Malawi, he calculated that he had preached a thousand sermons and had collected a thousand distinct species of plant. An unusual combination! This provides the basis for my claim that he was pioneering ecotheology.
He was not an academic theologian, but it does seem that he integrated his evangelical faith and his deep concern for the Malawi environment. He once put the question: “what higher reward can one have than the assurance in his own conscience of having conferred on posterity an endowment of fruit-bearing and long-lived trees?” Perhaps he was ahead of his time.
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