Biography
Little is known of Robert Maxwell Macbrair's private life: neither the date of his birth nor that of his death appears in the catalogues and archival collections consulted. A Scot holding a Master of Arts degree (M.A.), he entered the service of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1833, which appointed him to Alexandria. This first post opens the narrative he would publish six years later.
Rather than face a long sea voyage, the young missionary travelled to Egypt by way of France and Italy in the autumn of 1833, then through Malta, where he began to learn Arabic. In Egypt he divided his time between Alexandria and Cairo, twice sailed up the Nile as far as Philae and the cataracts, and in 1834 went on to Beirut, Baalbek and Damascus, in the Syria that Ibrahim Pasha had just conquered. He left Egypt early in 1835, as the plague was ravaging Alexandria.
That same year, the Society was looking for a volunteer capable of translating the Scriptures into the languages of West Africa. Macbrair offered himself, and his knowledge of Arabic weighed in the choice. The Society's archives, held at SOAS in London, record the books handed to him on 26 September 1835 so that he could put Fula and Mandinka into writing and translate the New Testament. He joined the Fula mission on MacCarthy Island, on the Gambia River, founded shortly before, and wrote to London between December 1835 and February 1836. The climate told on his health: he soon returned to England, accompanied by an African who helped him continue his work.
His linguistic works grew out of this stay. In 1842 the Society published his A Grammar of the Mandingo Language, with vocabularies, and the library of the University of Edinburgh also attributes to him a translation of the New Testament into that language. He wrote a grammar of Fula, which remained in manuscript and which he presented in 1851 to that same library, where it still is, as well as a pamphlet of advice on putting African languages into writing, composing elementary books for schools and translating the Scriptures.
His Sketches of a Missionary's Travels in Egypt, Syria, Western Africa appeared in London in 1839, published by Simpkin, Marshall and Co. Macbrair went on to publish Geology and Geologists in 1843, a reflection on the theories of the scientists of his day, and then in 1861, with Longman, The Africans at Home, a popular description of Africa and its peoples drawn from travellers' accounts since Mungo Park. The book was reissued in 1864 and translated into Dutch as early as 1863 under the title Afrika en de Afrikanen. After that, all trace of him is lost.
His travel narrative is striking for its tone. Pious and readily polemical, Macbrair is caustic towards customs officers, pashas and colonial officials, and denounces with equal vigour the oppression of the fellahin under Muhammad Ali and the slavery tolerated in the Gambia.
