Dan Crawford (1870-1926)

‘Konga Vantu’, the ‘gatherer of the people’

Daniel (Dan) Crawford was born on 7 December 1869¹ in Gourock, a town on the south bank of the Firth of Clyde, twentyeight miles west of Glasgow, Scotland. His father, Archibald, was the captain of a schooner based on the River Clyde. Sadly, Archibald Crawford died of tuberculosis when Dan was only four years old. However, God was watching over young Dan, because, although he too was later diagnosed with tuberculosis, he made a full recovery.

Educated at the local school, he left at the age of fourteen, without any higher education, to work first as a clerk in a solicitor’s office, but soon afterwards as a bookkeeper for a painter and decorator.

Under his widowed mother Mary’s influence, his was a devout Free Church of Scotland family, and as a teenager Dan had already become a Sunday-school teacher in Gourock Church. However, at that time he had begun to attend gospel meetings in a local Gospel Hall, and having been convicted of his need of salvation, was converted in May 1887, and was baptized four months later.

He became an avid reader of his Bible, and of good books written about it. He also became very concerned for the souls of others, and he started preaching the gospel. At the young age of eighteen, he gave up his job and became an evangelist, living by faith in total dependence on God to provide for all his needs, which was to be true for the rest of his life.

was through Arnot’s influence that Crawford was challenged to take the gospel to ‘the dark continent’. So, in March 1889, nineteen-year-old Dan, plus a dozen others, left for Africa under the leadership of Arnot. Dan eventually arrived at Bunkeya in Garenganza (now Katanga) in November 1890.

At that time there was a scramble for territory by the various European colonial powers. Among them were the British who were trying to convince the Garanganzi king Msiri to allow his kingdom to become a British Protectorate,

In September 1888, Dan Crawford met the Scottish missionary Frederick Arnot, who had just returned from two years in central Africa (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo) where he had founded the Garenganze Evangelical Mission. It but he refused. However, in late 1891, a Belgian Expeditionary force arrived, annexing the kingdom into their Congo Free State and killing king Msiri.

In the aftermath of the killing and the massacre of Msiri’s warriors, the 10,000-odd population of Bunkeya fled into the bush. Crawford moved to the western shore of Lake Mweru and established a mission there. The Congo Free State‘s agents’ brutality caused many to flee for safety to Crawford’s new mission, which was the origin of his African nickname ‘Konga Vantu’, meaning ‘gatherer of the people’. Crawford also persuaded many chiefs to give up their slaves, whom he took into his mission. He also adopted many orphans to stop them being sold as slaves. In 1893, he had to move to a better site near the Luanza River, where it flows into Lake Mweru. There the more fertile land was able to support a greater number of people. The village, called Luanza, became a large settlement, over a mile wide in places. In his early twenties, Dan had taken on the responsibility of looking after so many displaced persons.

Although based in Luanza for the rest of his life, Crawford travelled extensively in the area, evangelizing and immersing himself in the local languages and cultures.

Despite originally insisting that missionaries were best unmarried, Dan married Grace Tilsley of Bath, UK. She travelled out to marry him in 1896. They had one surviving child, a son called Lyndsay, born in 1900.

Despite the absence of any higher education, Dan was able to master Greek, Hebrew, and various African languages, translating the Bible into the Luba dialect, a difficult Bantu language that has nouns with twelve genders and verbs with thirty-two tenses! By early 1926 he had completed the final revision of the entire Bible, and it was at the printers. He had said that, if he were to die, he wanted to pillow his head on the Luba Bible!

Sometime during the night of May 29, 1926, having turned awkwardly, he knocked the back of his hand against the shelf near his bed. He thought little of it at the time, but the next day he noticed swelling and inflammation of the minor wound. Gangrene set in very quickly and the infection continued to spread rapidly up his arm. He slipped into a coma and died on June 3rd, 1926, at fifty-seven years of age.

Dan Crawford’s grave is fittingly in a cemetery on a high hill overlooking his town of Luanza. He had requested that his body be buried as that of an African - wrapped in a blanket and then with a grass mat. However, his body was also placed in a roughly made wooden coffin.

We would say today that Crawford was ‘a bit of a loner’, with whom many co-workers found it difficult to work. However, he was at his best trudging through the African countryside, studying African languages and seeking to better understand African customs and traditional rule.

During his thirty-seven years of service, Dan Crawford only returned to Britain once, from 1911 to 1915, during which time he also visited the United States and Australia to report on the Lord’s work in Africa.

The two great literary legacies Dan Crawford left were, first, the Bible in the local African dialect, and secondly his books Thinking Black: 22 Years without a Break in the Long Grass of Central Africa (1913) and its sequel Back to the Long Grass: My Link with Livingstone (1923). These books would afterwards become recommended reading for Europeans following in his footsteps into the African interior.