Murder at Morija

MURDER AT MORIJA, by Tim Couzens. Published by Random House, Johannesburg. 2003. 468pp.

Reviewed by Michael Shackleton

Here is another contribution to the scholarly record of Southern African history written by a competent and meticulous researcher. It is a history, rather than the telling of a real-life detective story, despite the first blurbs about the book, which mislead one into thinking it is entirely an analysis and a suggested explanation of an unresolved murder case.

In his unravelling of the tangled skein of clues that point to the most likely killer of a prominent member of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in Lesotho in 1920, Tim Couzens painstakingly chooses the long way. He presents the society’s origins and advance in a developing Southern Africa in order to provide the reader with a comprehensive background to the mysterious murder.

A few days before Christmas, the stern Protestant missionary Edouard Jacottet sat down to lunch with one of his four daughters and guests. Soon they all became violently ill and Jacottet never recovered. Murder by arsenic poisoning was suspected, and gradually two of the daughters and another missionary became suspects. Which one could have been the guilty party? After some arrests and an official inquiry, there was no subsequent trial and no one was ever convicted of murder.

The mission station of Morija was founded in the 1830s. Its success can be attributed broadly to the favour of the friendly King Moshoeshoe and his people. With some difficulty it survived the setbacks caused by the land-hungry Boers and the power-hungry British. Moshoeshoe found in the missionaries and their message a form of wisdom that complemented his own sense of the spiritual. He respected the stern Edouard Jacottet who was beyond doubt an honourable man of justice and compassion, with high moral standards.

Jacottet expected Moshoeshoe to become a Christian, but he never did. Perhaps, as Couzens points out, Moshoeshoe disliked the missionaries harping on the wrongness of polygamy, which he and his people practised.

The many characters featured in the narration are given added presence by an array of dramatic photographs and other illustrations. There are also helpful maps and lists of the important members of the Jacottet and Moshoeshoe families as well as of the missionaries and the British administrators.

The first Catholic missionary in Lesotho was the saintly Fr Joseph Gerard, the Oblate of Mary Immaculate. He arrived in Maseru in 1862 and found Moshoeshoe equally generous and benign towards this new expression of Christianity. He, too, befriended Moshoeshoe, was given land and was likewise disappointed when the king would not be baptised.

Was Moshoeshoe shrewd enough to grasp that, since the two faiths were not on amicable terms, he could play one against the other? Couzens touches on this riddle but leaves the matter there.

In the 26th of his 31 chapters, Couzens turns his attention again to the murder of Edouard Jacottet. He runs through a number of famous historical cases of murder by poisoning, then tackles the circumstances of the murder at Morija. His analysis is utterly thorough and his conclusions plausible. By examining each detail of the case in which no accused was eventually identified, he shows himself to be a worthy detective in his own right.

The wealth of systematic and historical information is brilliant, but it overwhelms the reader who, because the book starts with an unsolved murder, is surely anxious to know how the author provides a possible solution. Skilled editorial pruning and restructuring would have done the story no harm and would, I think, have made its impact greater, without losing the historical context.

Yet, those with time and patience and an avid interest in history will appreciate the author’s obvious mastery of his subject and his integrity as a historian.