At a prayer meeting on a cold Rotterdam night, the young clerk Aart Anthonij van der Lingen - a pale, sickly, hunchbacked 'fish from the North' - is held in the charismatic Reverend Johannes Kicherer's thrall. Lured by Kicherer's passion, he leaves his grey and loveless life to land at the Cape of Good Hope as a lay missionary in 1800. But when the Missionary Society draws lots to determine where to send the new arrivals, Van der Lingen is sent east and Kicherer north. The hunchback missionary must make his own way in a place that, on the surface, God has forsaken - until, as the pitiless landscape and the blank faces of his would-be congregants strip Van der Lingen incrementally of his pride, he learns that he has nothing to give to the Africa that is ultimately his salvation. Based on historical figures drawn from the Cape Town Church Archives, The Hunchback Missionary by Elsa Joubert, world-renowned author of The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, is a sweeping narrative of vanity and humility, of the sacred and the profane, of how Europe's rampant strides across newly colonised Africa led to the abyss from which a continent still struggles, today, to retreat.

Voted one of the hundred most important books published in Africa during the last century. Winner of the WA Hofmeyr Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Louis Luyt Prize.Sharing the language and religion or the Afrikaners bent on her people's subjugation, Poppie Nongena - a Xhosa woman born in an Upington township - has no choice but to negotiate the riptide of structural violence that is apartheid South Africa. Rootless, her ailing husband emasculated by legislation and her children bearing witness to her degradation, Poppie is forced on a spiritual and cultural journey from Lambert's Bay to a Cape Town township to Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape. Her heartache is the pain of a nation - an emblem of how the human spirit may strain under the weight of tyranny, yet adapts and prevails.Written to break the barrier of ignorance in late-1970s South Africa, The Long, Journey of Poppie Nongena - unsentimental but sensitive - documents a harrowing life lived in a time that a country would rather forget. A literary and commercial success when it was released in Afrikaans in 1979, Elsa Joubert's searing indictment of inhumanity remains universally relevant almost 40 years later in a world in which political dispensations continue to rise and fall. It has won a clutch of literary prizes, including the CNA and Hofmeyr, and has been translated into 13 languages and sold around the world. In 2002 it was selected by a panel of 16 international academi and writers as one of the 100 best African novels of the 20th century.

At a prayer meeting on a cold Rotterdam night, the young clerk Aart Anthonij van der Lingen -- a pale, sickly, hunchbacked 'fish from the North' -- is held in the charismatic Reverend Johannes Kicherers thrall. Lured by Kicherers passion, he leaves his grey and loveless life to land at the Cape of Good Hope as a lay missionary in 1800. But when the Missionary Society draws lots to determine where to send the new arrivals, Van der Lingen is sent east and Kicherer north. The hunchback missionary must make his own way in a place that, on the surface, God has forsaken -- until, as the pitiless landscape and the blank faces of his would-be congregants strip Van der Lingen incrementally of his pride, he learns that he has nothing to give to the Africa that is ultimately his salvation. Based on historical figures drawn from the Cape Town Church Archives, The Hunchback Missionary is a sweeping narrative of vanity and humility, of the sacred and the profane, of how Europes rampant strides across newly colonised Africa led to the abyss from which a continent still struggles, today, to retreat.

Vols. for 1828-1934 contain the Proceedings at large of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.