Heading: (South Africa - American woman missionary to the Zulus, 1885)
Author: Susan Wright Tyler
Title: Letter from an American woman missionary among the Zulus of South Africa
Place Published: Umsunduzi, Natal, South Africa
Publisher:
Date Published: March 19, 1885
Description:

Autograph Letter Signed. 6 x 9 inches, 8pp. To Mrs. Davis, about the difficult missionary work among the Zulus she shared with her husband and two grown daughters.

57 year-old Susan Wright Tyler was the wife of Rev. Josiah Tyler, whose father was President of Dartmouth College. They had come to Africa together as missionaries in the 1850s, their mission being inland from Durban on the southeast coast of South Africa, half way to present-day Lesotho. A year later, Mrs. Tyler became ill with pneumonia and died in 1887. Her husband survived her by eight years, and while he later published his memoirs of their work together (" Forty Years Among the Zulus"), we could locate no other letters of either Tyler or his wife held by any American institution.

The life Mrs. Tyler describes was a difficult one, the burdens of training the natives, Christian and "heathen", being shared by the entire family, including her two grown daughters. (She hoped to soon send the younger back to America, to live in the more "civilized and religious atmosphere of our own country".)

The natives were friendly, the women being taught to ride horses, sew and perform other "household duties", but they "feared" to "refuse" their husbands' demand for liquor, drunkenness being a perpetual problem the Tylers could not solve. Temperance meetings were held regularly for the "clad people", but "the truth was working in their hearts" very gradually, and even those who "took the pledge" to "drink no more" found "excuses and reasonings" to "follow the traditions of their father" in sociably consuming and sharing the locally-produced native beer.

Very good.