MANGANE MAAKE MOKONE

Yes, Professor Councill, the battles and wars we are facing in this part of Africa are fierce and terrible. Here it is amid persecution and oppositions from the surrounding brothers, who are supposed to be missionaries. They have displayed the conspicuous and prominent scope in writing newspapers against the colored people's education, giving vain false reasons that education and Christianity spoil the colored, which exhibits they are the deniers and contradictors of their profession and confession. And we, the colored, have looked upon that as a betrayal, at any rate, and they have seemed to have made a trade of the Word of God. We pray every year for our education, as they expose, we receive good education, a deliberate untruthfulness, and there is no progress whatever of any description, and consequently we have taken a disbelief of them. This is the only reason we have started our own mission by ourselves to try to teach, Christianize the civilization [in] our own country. The missionaries have mostly smeared our lips with fat and honey to suppress.

- Mangane Maake Mokone, "Letter to Bishop Turner", Voice of Missions April,1896