Looking Back
100 Years of Africa’s Pioneering Division
Lighting the Continent With Present Truth
The Southern Africa-Indian Ocean Division (SID) celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2020. This article reviews some aspects of the Adventist work in the division since its organization.—Editors.
T
he Seventh-day Adventist message reached South Africa in 1871 when mineral prospector William Hunt arrived in Kimberley on a diamond-hunting expedition. Just three years prior, Hunt, from Nevada, United States, had attended a series of evangelistic meetings led by J. N. Loughborough in Healdsburg, California. Hunt accepted the biblical truths presented and joined the Adventist believers, promising Loughborough that he would share the gospel message wherever he traveled. True to his promise, Hunt placed a Signs of the Times magazine in the hands of J. H. G. Wilson, a local Methodist preacher, who, together with his wife, embraced the Seventh-day Adventist faith. A letter from Wilson, published in the June 6, 1878, issue of the Review and Herald, reported that several 24
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people had become fully convinced of truth taught by the Adventists. Hunt’s witnessing efforts to George Van Druten and Pieter Wessels, who had independently begun observing the Sabbath, resulted in missionaries C. L. Boyd and D. A. Robinson arriving in Kimberley in July 1887. Their first congregation, located in Beaconsfield, consisted of 26 members.1 Another congregation soon followed in Cape Town in 1889, and soon after, the South African Conference was organized by A. T. Robinson, who became its first president. In Cape Town, the church established Claremont Union College, Plumstead Orphanage, Claremont Sanitarium, and a small printing press, before organizing the South African Union Conference in 1902. The union conference expanded its outreach both in South Africa and the northern countries now known as Malawi and Zambia, using Solusi Mission in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, as a base. This growth of the church in Southern Africa paved the way for the establishment of the division organization.
William H. Branson
DIVISION ORGANIZATION
When Elmer E. Andross, a vice president of the General Conference, visited South Africa in July 1919, the South African Union Conference voted a request to the General Conference to consider the possibility of organizing the African field into a division.2 The General Conference approved the request and voted on October 16, 1919, to create the African Division. William H. Branson was appointed vice president of the General Conference in charge of the African Division.3 Branson and his family arrived in South Africa in August 1920 to assume his duties. The division offices were located in Claremont, Cape Town,4 and church membership across three unions stood at 2,705. Branson and other church leaders visited government and state departments to acquaint state leaders with denominational principles and ideals, and obtained legal recognition and standing for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the region.5 METHODS OF GROWTH
In 1901 William H. Anderson, one of the pioneering missionaries in Africa, stated, “All missionary societies laboring in Africa are agreed that the best way to reach the natives is through schools.”6 The church established schools for Adventist young people, but children of all religious backgrounds were invited to join.
