author
Hannah Frances Davidson
1860–1935
A pioneering Brethren in Christ missionary, she turned years of work in southern Africa into a vivid firsthand narrative. Her writing preserves both the hardships of mission life and her observations of the communities she lived among.
1 Audiobook
South and South Central Africa A record of fifteen years' missionary labors among primitive peoples
by Hannah Frances Davidson
About the author
Born in Ohio in 1860, Hannah Frances Davidson was the daughter of Henry Davidson, an early Brethren in Christ leader and editor. Sources describe her as one of the denomination’s early academically trained women, with studies at Ashland College and degrees from Kalamazoo College.
Davidson is best known for her long missionary service in southern Africa. Reference works on her life describe her as a pioneer Brethren in Christ missionary in Rhodesia, and her best-known book, South and South Central Africa (1915), grew out of roughly fifteen years of missionary labor and travel in the region.
Today she is remembered both as a missionary and as an author whose work offers a firsthand historical account of cross-cultural religious life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Because the language and attitudes of her era appear in her writing, modern readers may also approach the book as a document of its time as well as a personal narrative.