Dr John Philip was a figure who towered over nineteenth-century South African history, and was perhaps the most influential South African in the larger world of empire before Cecil Rhodes. But he is largely forgotten or misremembered today. From the time he arrived in South Africa as superintendent of the London Missionary Society in 1819, Philip played a major role in the idealist and humanitarian campaigns of the day, working with English philanthropists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Fowell Buxton and African leaders such as Waterboer, Moshoeshoe and Maqoma. He was a creature of an age of extraordinary optimism, who held out a vision of non-racialism and progress that needs to be rediscovered and remembered. Dr Philip
