This book can be read at two levels. First and foremost it is a study of one Presbyterian dynasty and its impact on the history of southern and central Africa. Andrew Murray Sr (1794–1866) was one of a group of Scots Presbyterian ministers recruited in the 1820s at the request of the British governor of the Cape Colony in order to promote British influence in the infant Dutch Reformed Church. By 1833 twelve of the twenty-two ministers in that Church were Scots. Murray married a young Cape Dutchwoman, Maria Stegmann. Of their eleven children who survived into adulthood, five became ministers. The most important was Andrew Murray Jr (1828–1917). Like a number of these ‘Scots Afrikaners’, Andrew Jr studied theology both in Scotland and in the Netherlands. At Utrecht University he was influenced by the Réveil, an Evangelical pietist movement that was renewing and challenging Calvinist orthodoxy in the Netherlands. Murray returned to South Africa with a passion for missions and a hatred for theological liberalism. He was assigned a vast parish beyond the formal boundaries of the colony at Bloemfontein, where he ministered to the Voortrekkers who had sought to escape British imperialism by migrating beyond the Vaal river. Andrew Jr rightly occupies centre stage in Müller's account, but he also illuminates the significance of other members of the dynasty. Andrew's brother John became the first professor at Stellenbosch Seminary, antecedent of Stellenbosch University. Andrew's nephew, Andrew Charles, was one of the first two missionaries sent to Nyasaland in 1888 by the Ministers’ Missionary Union, a voluntary body of DRC ministers established in 1886 on his uncle's initiative. Another nephew, A. A. Louw, became the first DRC missionary to Mashonaland, and married the sister of D. F. Malan, the first apartheid-era prime minister of South Africa. A cousin of A. C. Murray, William Hoppe Murray, led the DRC mission to Nyasaland, where he was active in Bible translation and in cementing the union with the Blantyre and Livingstonia missions of the United Free Church of Scotland to form the Church of Christ (Presbyterian) in Central Africa (CCAP) in 1924. Andrew Murray's sister, wife, daughter and niece were prominent in the early years of the Huguenot Seminary at Wellington, founded by Murray in 1874 on the model of the Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts; like its American Holiness counterpart, the seminary became a training ground for women missionaries. Müller's book is welcome as the first comprehensive assessment of the historical significance of the Murray dynasty. The reader may become lost amidst the constellation of Murrays, and a family tree would have been helpful.

At a deeper level, The Scots Afrikaners adds to recent scholarship (notably by Richard Elphick) on the missionary sources of apartheid ideology. Müller argues that the two Andrew Murrays were not simply responsible for infusing the DRC with enthusiasm for missions to black Africans – as earlier writing has emphasised – but that they saw themselves as missionaries to the Boers. They regarded the Afrikaners as ‘weaker brothers’ whose racial prejudices had to be accommodated for the sake of evangelism. The crucial piece of evidence in support of this case is Andrew Sr's moving of a motion in the Cape synod in 1857 affirming that, although Scripture supported the admission of ‘heathen’ converts to white congregations, racial segregation should be tolerated in deference to ‘the weakness of some’. Müller develops this point into a rather speculative argument that the Scots Afrikaners as a group pursued ‘intentional hybridity’ as a missionary technique of indigenisation. Whether it was intentional or not, there is no doubt that the Murray clan, as a dynasty combining Scots and Afrikaner parentage, produced offspring who ‘went native’ and became typically Afrikaner. One of Andrew's sons, John Neithling Murray, was deported to India as a prisoner of war during the South African War of 1899–1902, while one of his nephews, Willie Louw, was executed by the British. William Hoppe Murray nearly scuppered the negotiations to form the CCAP in 1924 by insisting that white and black delegates ate separately, and the Scottish missionaries reluctantly ceded the point. Andrew Murray himself took the Boer side in the South African War. Yet he remained a pan-Evangelical and multi-racialist, combining conservative Evangelicalism and political liberalism in a synthesis rarely matched in later South African history. By the 1930s hard-line Afrikaner theologians were dismissing the Murray tradition as a form of ‘Methodism’, manifesting experiential piety but lacking in Calvinist theological backbone. Murray was no Methodist, but the accusation contained a grain of truth: as a student Murray had imbibed from Utrecht's version of the ‘Holy Club’, known as Sechor Dabar (‘Remember the Word’), a zeal for Evangelical unity in mission that ultimately ran against the grain of Afrikaner national identity.