Morrison, W. M. Exercise Book on Buluba-Lulua Grammar [Rev. J. Hershey Longnecker's copy]

Morrison, W. M. Exercise Book on Buluba-Lulua Grammar [Rev. J. Hershey Longnecker's copy]; Originally compiled by Dr. W. M. Morrison, Printed in 1912, reprinted in 1916. Revised in 1930 in a mimeographed form. Present edition is a revision of the mimeographed edition. Luebo, Belgian Congo: Printed at the J. Leighton Wilson Press, American Presbyterian Congo Mission, 1941. [7640]

Red cloth spine, tan paper over card with black ink title to front, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches, signed "Rev. J. H. Longenecker, A. P. C. M. Luelo" on the ffep. 94 clean pp. Good. Hardcover.

Originally published in 1912 with the title Buluba-Lulua Exercise Book, with 84 pp. Contains a series of lessons based on the author's Buluba-Lulua Grammar and Dictionary.

Rev. John Hershey Longenecker (1889-1978), b. Landisville, Pennsylvania; d. Morristown, Tennessee. Longnecker moved to Kentucky as a young man to serve the Society of Soul Winners founded by Confederate army officer & Presbyterian minister Edward O. Guerrant. He chose the Christian ministry as his life work, and became a graduate of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1916, and was a Southern Presbyterian missionary in the town of Luebo (Congo) from 1917 to 1950. After resigning from missionary work due to a diagnosis of diabetes, Rev. Longenecker continued in the Christian ministry as pastor of the Presbyterian church at Quitman, Georgia (1951-54) and at Roebuck and Centery Point, South Carolina (1955-56). His concerns about the direction of the PCUSA led him to withdraw and unite with the PCA.

"The Presbyterian Mission and its Press have made a profound impact on the language of Central Africa. The mission not only issued the first written works in the Tshiluba language [Buluba-Lulua], it issued these publications in a transliteration which is a technical masterpiece, faithfully executed by William M. Morrison. Morrison's lexicographical work received the highest praise from the renown linguist Torday who referred to his Tishluba dictionary as 'a masterpiece which renders all similar work useless.' And Morrison's Tshiluba Bible, and as revised by later Tshiluba language scholars, is considered the literary monument and standard of the language, as the King James Bible is in English or Martin Luther's Bible in German. When students of Tshibula seek to ascertain a correct usage or translation, they turn to the Tshiluba Bible as a resource and model." - Robert Benedetto, The Presbyterian Mission Press in Central Africa, 1890-1922 in American Presbyterians Vol 68, No. 1. (Spring, 1990) p. 63.

William McCutchan Morrison (1867-1918), b. near Lexington, Rockbridge Co., Virginia; d. Luebo, Congo. A missionary with the Presbyterian Church (South), he labored in the Belgian Congo as an evangelist and Bible translator. His writings exposed the abuses suffered by the natives at the hands of their colonial overlords.