Francis Owen (missionary)

Francis Owen was the first English missionary to the Zulu kingdom, then ruled by King Dingane. He and his household were the only white witnesses to the massacre of Piet Retief and his approximate 80 followers in February 1838 in the Zulu capital of Umgungundlovu. He is also the only European to leave a detailed account of life in the Zulu court and travelling through Natal at that time.

Owen was born in Chelsea, London in 1802 and in 1836 was a vicar in Normanton, West Yorkshire when he attended a lecture given by a retired naval captain, Allen Francis Gardiner, who was seeking a missionary to help him convert the Zulu people to Christianity. Owen decided to take up the challenge and travelled to South Africa in 1837 with his wife (Sarah Pennington Owen), daughter (name not known), sister Mary, (who later became a botanist in South Africa) and a maidservant called Jane Williams, later Jane Bird.

Owen's mission was not a success. Dingane was deeply suspicious of the Christian teaching and the journal includes accounts of his many interrogations of Christian beliefs. When Retief's party arrived in the Zulu capital, Owen was invited by the king to help draw up a written agreement for the allocation of some Zulu land for Retief and his Boer settlers. This was done with the help of a twelve-year-old boy called William Woods who could speak both Zulu and English. However, before the settlers could leave, Dingane invited them to a farewell celebration where he had them all killed.

One of the reasons that Owen's party survived the aftermath of the massacre was due to the deliberate misinterpretation of Owen by William Woods. In his journal, Owen records that when asked by Dingane's representative whether he approved of the killing of Retief's men, he replied that he could not condone such an action. However, years later Woods provided his own account of the meeting and confessed that he had reported Owen's response as agreeing that such killing was necessary. After several further tense interviews with the king, they were finally able to leave his capital for Port Natal (Durban.) They were still there when Dingane sent a force to raze Port Natal to the ground and kill its occupants but were able to take shelter onboard a ship called the Comet, at anchor in the bay.

Owen left the Church Missionary Society and returned to England in 1841. In 1844 he became the second vicar of St Thomas’ Crookes Church in Sheffield. He served there for nearly ten years before taking a tour of the Holy Land. As he embarked for home he caught ‘Syrian fever’ and died in Alexandria on 14th November 1854, aged 52. There is a memorial to him in this church.

In 1857 his wife remarried another clergyman, John Livesey. She died in 1863, aged 54.

Literary references

Owen and his family appear as characters in the book Flashman and the Zulus by Robert Brightwell.