George Mccall Theal

Kaffir Folk-lore (Dodo Press) George Mccall Theal

George McCall Theal (1837-1919) was the most prolific and influential South African historian, archivist and genealogist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He left home early and lived briefly in the United States and Sierra Leone before emigrating to South Africa. There he became a teacher but soon moved to journalism, publishing, and an unsuccessful stint as an amateur diamond miner, all in South African frontier communities. His career as a historian began with the publication of his Compendium of South African History and Geography in 1873 following his return to teaching. He spent five years at the Lovedale Seminary outside Alice in the Eastern Cape, working amongst missionaries and Africans. He had taught first at an elementary school in Knysna and from 1867 at a public school in King William's Town, later to become Dale College. He had also been editor of three minor British Kaffrarian newspapers between 1862 and 1865, and later worked for the Kaffrarian Watchman in King William's Town, where he printed his first contribution South Africa as It Is in 1871. His other works include: Kaffir Folk-Lore (1882), Boers and Bantu (1886) and The Republic of Natal (1886).