Murder at Morija

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by Weisfelder, Richard

Tim Couzens. Murder at Morija. Johannesburg: Random House. 2003. xxii 474 pp. Genealogies. Maps. Photographs. Sources. Index. R 250. Cloth.

The unsolved murder in 1920 of Édouard Jacottet, a sixty-two-year-old Paris Evangelical Society missionary, is the bait used by Tim Couzens to get readers to explore the precolonial and colonial history of Lesotho. Erroneously characterized as "fiction" in one list of recent publications, probably because its title sounds like a whodunit, this book has been meticulously researched. In addition to having pursued extensive archival work and interviewing in Lesotho, South Africa, Britain, France, and Switzerland, Couzens almost perished in a blizzard high in the Drakensberg while following the route Jacottet took on one of his journeys through the mountainous interior of Lesotho.

Although Murder at Morija has sold over seven thousand copies, primarily in southern Africa, and has received very positive reviews, the book demonstrates that more is not necessarily better when it comes to narrating a gripping tale. Couzens's most salient theme is the heroic and ultimately successful struggle of several generations of missionaries to establish their denomination in Lesotho and then to transform it into the self-sustaining Lesotho Evangelical Church run by indigenous Basotho clergy and laity. This was the cause to which Jacottet had committed himself despite considerable resistance among his fellow missionaries. Unfortunately, Couzens seemed compelled by his insatiable curiosity to digress into virtually every other conceivably related theme. Hence the book includes far more than was needed about the early history of the Basotho nation under its founder, Moshoeshoe, about theological disputes among Swiss and French Calvinists, and about the historical use of poisons and the fates of poisoners, especially those who were female or parricides.

Couzens points out that those who felt called to mission work paid a high physical and emotional price, leaving parents and friends behind, enduring difficult sea and overland voyages, and facing lonely service in isolated stations before becoming fluent in the local language, in this case Sesotho. Even later generations endured long separations from their children, who were sent to school in Europe and to live with surrogate families before reaching their teens. He evaluates the missionaries' complex personal and professional interactions with colleagues, Basotho chiefs, colonial administrators, competing missions, and Boer settlers eager to annex portions of Lesotho. He underscores the crucial role that missionary wives had to assume in mission activities in addition to bearing and bringing up their children.

Using Arbousset, Casalis, Mabille, Jacottet, and others, Couzens shows how their evangelistic objective was complicated by their rigid rejection of Sesotho customs such as polygyny, initiation schools, and marriage by transfer of cattle. He also observes how many of them became ardent supporters of the autonomy of Lesotho, often at the cost of exile or destruction of their mission stations by the Boers. He illustrates the difficulties caused by the perennial shortage of funds and pressures to divert support from Lesotho to new colonies acquired by France. In a particularly poignant section, Couzens portrays the impact of the loss of a generation of sons, nephews, and grandsons of missionaries in the trenches of World War I. Indeed, he suggests that the removal of this cadre of likely husbands may have directly contributed to the only partially repressed sexual tensions among Jacottet's daughters, Marcelle and Marguerite, and their ultimate fall from grace. Similarly, he notes that the lengthy absence in Europe of the Reverend Sam Duby's wife probably contributed to his affair with Marguerite, an affair that led directly to Jacottet's poisoning.

From Jacottet's voluminous correspondence, often off the record, with directors of the Mission Society in Paris, Couzens fashions a complex portrait of this highly intelligent, talented, and ambitious, but often conflicted and sometimes unbending individual. His interviews with several of Jacottet's descendants reveal the complicated intimate relationships of the Jacottet family, particularly the tendency to depression that affected his wife, daughters, and youngest son, Claude. Jacottet's commitment to Lesotho was total, despite illness and advancing age. He rejected a lucrative appointment as chair of the African Language Department at the University of Witwatersrand but served frequent terms as president of the Missionary Conference and reluctantly assumed leadership of the Theological School, in addition to his many other duties. Couzens notes that Jacottet put his duties to the Mission ahead of attending to the psychological well-being of his daughters, especially after the death of his wife, thereby setting the stage for his own murder.

The book begins with the murder, the subsequent arrest of Jacottet's daughters, Marcelle and Marguerite, and the Reverend Sam Duby, and their eventual release by Resident Commissioner Garraway for lack of conclusive evidence. About three hundred pages later, Couzens returns to the murder and provides his own assessment of who did it, although he examines the full range of possibilities and notes possible problems with his own verdict. (No clues are provided here, lest they lessen your incentive to read the book!) The conclusion portrays the devastating impact of Jacottet's scandalous death on the well-being of the mission and on his family.