The sense I have with this book is that it somehow pursued me, demanding to be written. My interest in the early history of Blantyre Mission goes back to the late 1980s and 1990s when I was becoming acquainted with Malawi in general and serving as a minister of the CCAP Blantyre Synod in particular. At a time when Malawi was struggling with questions of identity, I found that interactions with Malawian colleagues prompted me to think again about the role of Blantyre Mission in the making of the nation 100 years earlier. On return visits to Scotland, I enjoyed long conversations with Andrew Ross who, thirty years earlier, had done his PhD research, at that time unpublished, on Blantyre Mission history. It was a pleasure to collaborate with Andrew on the publication of his doctoral thesis as one of the first books in the Kachere Series, which was launched in the mid-1990s.

This stimulated my own research and I published a series of articles on different aspects of Blantyre Mission history: ‘Vernacular Translation in Christian Mission: the Case of David Clement Scott and the Blantyre Mission 1888–98’; ‘The African Church and Eastern Orthodoxy: Reflections on the Centenary of St Michael and All Angels’; ‘Where were the Prophets and Martyrs in Banda's Malawi: Four Presbyterian Ministers’; ‘Crisis and Identity: Presbyterian Ecclesiology in Southern Malawi 1891–1993’.

On my return to Scotland, Malawi history continued to be often on my mind, leading, amongst other things, to the publication of my attempt at a comprehensive account of the 150-year-old relationship between Scotland and Malawi: Malawi and Scotland: Together in the Talking Place since 1859. Through all this research and writing the figure of Alexander Hetherwick was always present, clearly a major influence but somehow not fully accounted for. Periodic conversations with Malawi historians like the late John McCracken and the late Jack Thompson sometimes came round to the question of whether it was time for a new biography of Alexander Hetherwick.

It was, however, my return to Malawi in 2019 that provided the impetus needed to make it happen. From June to December 2019 I was living on the Blantyre Mission. My everyday surroundings, particularly the ever-astonishing church of St Michael and All Angels, inevitably called David Clement Scott and Alexander Hetherwick to mind.