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Just before Christmas in 1920, six people sat down to a meal at Morija, headquarters of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in Basutoland (Lesotho). All six were taken violently ill, and one of them died. They had been poisoned. The dead man was Édouard Jacottet, an eminent scholar and missionary. There was no trial and subsequently no one was ever convicted of the murder. Who killed Jacottet? Drawing on the great tradition of the “locked room” detective story, Tim Couzens sets out, eighty years after the event, to solve the crime. Why was Jacottet killed? The answer lies buried deep in the past and is revealed here – for the first time – in a tale of heroism and courage, of sacrifice, deception, betrayal, and faith. Written and researched with extraordinary care, this is a brilliant piece of detective work, but it is also much more. It is the biography of a deeply committed man, and a history of the Christian mission he served in an isolated African country to whose people and language he devoted his life before it was brutally cut short in strange circumstances. And the story is a national and religious epic, enclosed in a classical tragedy tempered with the sardonic smile of comedy. A compelling, groundbreaking study, Murder at Morija
is the outcome of many years of travel and detailed inquiry by
its author in pursuit of elusive solutions to complex mysteries. Tim Couzens won both the CNA Literary award and the Johannesburg Sunday Times Alan Paton award for Tramp Royal: The True Story of Trader Horn. He is Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities at the University of Witwatersrand. |
The University of
Virginia Press