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Name: MACKAY, Alexander Murdoch
Birth Date: 13.10.1849 Rhynie, Aberdeenshire
Death Date: 8.2.1890 Usambiro at south end of Lake Victoria
First Date: 1876
Last Date: 1890
Profession: An engineer from England with first party of missionaries to Uganda - he developed dysentery and was sent back to the coast in 1876. Reached Uganda in 1879. Began Industrial Mission work - workshops and smithy etc.
Area: Outstanding linguist. 18 years in Uganda. Interred at Namirembe 1927
Book Reference: Gillett, Tucker, North, CMS, EAHB 1904, Barnes
General Information:
CMS 1876 - Age 26. Of Rhynie, Scotland. Engineer at Berlin. 1876 accepted January 25; and April 27 to the Eastern Equatorial Africa - Nyanza - Mission. Detained on and near the coast by illness, and in making a road to Mpwapwa; but ultimately reached Uganda and joined Wilson, Dec 1878. 1879, Wilson invalided and Mackay in 3 years the only member of the original party of 1876 left in Uganda. 1890, Feb 8, died at Usambiro. During the whole period he never left EA, and for the greater part of the time was in the capital itself. Memoir by his sister.
St Paul's Namirembe cemetery - Alexander Murdoch Mackay, 13 Oct 1849 - 8 Feb 1890, Usambiro
See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry
H. Gresford Jones, Uganda in Transformation, 1926 : Mackay was born to a missionary's life. With his mother's earliest teaching he imbibed sympathy with the aspirations of the backward races of the world. At the age of 8 he was a printer, quoting to his father the saying of Luther that " printing is the latest and greatest gift by which God enables us to advance the things of the Gospel." As a boy he was a devourer of books, though every spare hour was spent in the smithy or carpenter's shop, handling tools of all kinds. At 15 we see him at the Aberdeen Grammar School. At 18 he is at the Free Church training college for teachers in Edinburgh, studying engineering at the University at the same time. Next, with a letter in his pocket to Dr. Bonar, Court Chaplain in Berlin, we see him landing on 1 November, 1873, at Hamburg, to learn German and to qualify himself fully as an engineer. It was there in Germany that Henry Wright's appeal in 1875 for pioneer missionaries for Uganda caught his eye.The same night that he first read the appeal he offered his services, and on 27 April, 1876, he sailed for Zanzibar.
H. Gresford Jones, Uganda in Transformation, 1926 : Mackay was born to a missionary's life. With his mother's earliest teaching he imbibed sympathy with the aspirations of the backward races of the world. At the age of 8 he was a printer, quoting to his father the saying of Luther that " printing is the latest and greatest gift by which God enables us to advance the things of the Gospel." As a boy he was a devourer of books, though every spare hour was spent in the smithy or carpenter's shop, handling tools of all kinds. At 15 we see him at the Aberdeen Grammar School. At 18 he is at the Free Church training college for teachers in Edinburgh, studying engineering at the University at the same time. Next, with a letter in his pocket to Dr. Bonar, Court Chaplain in Berlin, we see him landing on 1 November, 1873, at Hamburg, to learn German and to qualify himself fully as an engineer. It was there in Germany that Henry Wright's appeal in 1875 for pioneer missionaries for Uganda caught his eye.The same night that he first read the appeal he offered his services, and on 27 April, 1876, he sailed for Zanzibar.