John Philip

John Philip (born April 14, 1775, Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scot.—died Aug. 27, 1851, Hankey, Cape Colony [now in South Africa]) was a Scottish missionary in Southern Africa who championed the rights of the Africans against the European settlers.

In 1818, at the invitation of the London Missionary Society (now Council for World Mission), Philip left his congregation in Aberdeen, where he had served since 1804, to investigate the conditions at mission stations in what is now South Africa. His findings led to a condemnation of the colonists for their harsh treatment of the Khoekhoe. Subsequently appointed the first superintendent for the missions of the society, Philip devoted the rest of his life to promoting the cause of the Africans and the Griqua, people of mixed Khoekhoe and European ancestry. He was unpopular among the settlers and ignored by local authorities, but he aroused philanthropic sentiment in Britain with his lecture tour in 1826 and his expertly polemical Researches in South Africa (1828). In 1828 the Cape Colony’s government fully revised the colony’s labour legislation (Ordinance 49 of that year permitted Africans from outside the colony to work on better farms on a contract basis; Ordinance 50 freed the colony’s Griqua labourers from their position as serfs); these changes were said to be in some part due to his lobbying. In the 1830s he hoped to create a series of Griqua and African states to the north and east of Cape Colony, but in the end colonial expansion prevailed.

Philip is a controversial figure in South African historiography. To his admirers, such as W.M. Macmillan, he was a high-minded, far-sighted humanitarian who did much to promote the welfare of the Africans. Not surprisingly, his white settler detractors saw him as an arbitrary mischief maker who used false evidence and political intrigue to gain his ends.