Murder at Morija
Tim Couzens
(Random House)
The words “murder”, “mayhem” and “missionaries” seldom form an alliterative trinity, particularly in a work of post-15th-century history, but Tim Couzens has managed to make such a curious combination the subject of this eminently readable — and likely to be controversial — book.
On December 22 1920, after consuming their lunchtime soup at the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (Pems) station at Morija, Basutoland (Lesotho), the Reverend Édouard Jacottet, his daughter Madeleine, his son Harold, two visiting missionaries from Mozambique and a school inspector were violently ill. Jacottet died soon afterwards, and the medical diagnosis was poisoning. In February 1921 Madeleine, her sister Marcelle and another Paris missionary, Samuel Duby, were arrested and charged with Jacottet’s murder.
On March 3 of the same year the Assistant Commissioner’s Court, on the grounds of “insufficient evidence”, released all three. Yet the rumours spread and the scandal lingered. The question of who murdered Édouard Jacottet remained. More importantly, as Couzens demonstrates, the question may even be why.
This unsolved murder mystery is the narrative and analytical framework for Couzens’s historical examination of the role of successive generations of Pems missionaries in Lesotho during the 19th century. Couzens traces the role of this French-speaking Calvinist group’s often turbulent history in Southern Africa back to its first generation.
Some local chieftains welcomed them; others were hostile. King Moshoeshoe, founder of the Basuto nation, was welcoming, but even in his own family there were enemies of the Pems — some rejecting in toto this alien faith, others shifting religious allegiances to Catholic and Anglican missionaries. Very soon the missionaries found themselves caught in political conflicts, particularly the three-way conflicts between Basuto, Boer and Brit. As French or Swiss, the Pems had the advantage of some critical distance. It was often the mediator in conflicts.
In “normal” times the routine problems facing any missionary organisation were confronted: translating Bibles and religious literature into indigenous languages, maintaining the mission station, finding and forming suitable converts. Understandings of marriage, sexuality and divergent cultures clashed then, as they do now, with Christian orthodoxy.
By the time Édouard Jacottet and his wife arrived in Morija in 1884, the politics of the area was less overtly conflictual but low-level tensions still abounded. Like most married missionary families, the Jacottets found themselves trying to raise children in a land that was foreign to them and often dangerous.
An underlying theme woven through the missionary narrative is sexual tension. Many of the missionaries were unmarried, or were married quickly before going to “the missions”. Despite the high standards of sexual morality that Pems Calvinism preached, illicit sexual activity occurred — often in the “taboo” area of relationships with the Basuto. In December 1920 Duby was in the process of quietly exiting Basutoland and Morija on the discovery of his adulterous affair with Marguerite, Jacottet’s youngest daughter. It was the discovery of this affair that led to their indictment, together with Marguerite’s elder sister, Marcelle (who perhaps had her own reasons for either murdering or conspiring to murder her father).
As it turned out, it seems that race saved them from a criminal trial. The penalty for murder in Basutoland in 1920 was death by hanging. No white person had ever been hanged. To execute a white person — and a missionary’s daughter at that — was politically unacceptable. Yet, as Couzens recounts, the scandal did not pass away with the quashing of the trial.
Who really committed the murder? Couzens has weighed the evidence and come up with the most likely suspect. He has also sought to explain why. To give away any further information would be unfair to author and reader alike.
Some readers may find the structure of the book frustrating, beginning as it does with domestic murder, then launching into 300 pages of missionary history before returning to the criminal denouement.
Some might object that this is an attempt to pad out an already long book, or to write two books in one, or simply that Couzens’s literary technique is an attempt to get on the “postmodern” biographical bandwagon and do a South African Peter Ackroyd or Edmund Morris. If one claims the latter, one must say in his defence that he is far less quirky or cavalier with history than these other two authors.
It is certainly true that Couzens’s approach tempts the reader to skip the bulk of the book to find out whodunnit. Such a step, though thoroughly understandable, would be a pity: the reader would miss an outstanding piece of historical research and would risk losing the finer nuances of the missionary “ambience” that contributed to the murder of Jacottet.
What brings the book together and makes it work is the quality of Tim Couzens’s writing. He is, quite simply, a very good storyteller, who holds the reader’s attention even in the many plots and sub-plots that unfold. Murder at Morija has to be a contender for the Alan Paton Prize.