author
Robert Hamill Nassau
1835–1921
A doctor, minister, and missionary, he spent about forty years in West Africa and wrote vivid books about the people, beliefs, and daily life he encountered there. His work sits at the crossroads of mission history, travel writing, and early ethnography.
2 Audiobooks
Fetichism in West Africa : forty years' observation of native customs and superstitions
by Robert Hamill Nassau
Where Animals Talk: West African Folk Lore Tales
by Robert Hamill Nassau
About the author
Born in Pennsylvania in 1835, Robert Hamill Nassau became both an ordained Presbyterian minister and a physician before leaving for mission work in West Africa. He was appointed in 1861 to serve on Corisco Island and later worked in places including Benito and the Ogowe region, building a reputation as a long-serving pioneer of Presbyterian mission work there.
Nassau is remembered not only for his decades of service in Africa, but also for the books he wrote out of that experience. Works such as Corisco and Comassie, The Fetichism of West Africa, and A Missionary Heroine in the Congo introduced many English-speaking readers to Central and West African societies, customs, and religious life, though they also reflect the assumptions and language of his era.
He died on May 6, 1921. Today, his writing is often read for several reasons at once: as missionary memoir, as a historical record of West and Central Africa in the late nineteenth century, and as an example of how outsiders interpreted African cultures during that period.