Horace Waller (activist)

He was known as a writer on Africa, evangelical Christian, close associate of David Livingstone and others involved in central and east African mission and exploration work, and advocate of British imperial expansion.

[2] With the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), Waller went out in 1861 to the regions recently visited by David Livingstone and Sir John Kirk.

For a period he worked with Charles Frederick Mackenzie, bishop of Central Africa, and was associated with Livingstone in the Zambesi River and Shire Highlands districts.

[1] Returning to England after the death of Mackenzie in 1862, Waller was in 1867 ordained by the bishop of Rochester to the curacy of St. John, Chatham; in 1870 he moved to the vicarage of Leytonstone, Essex, and in 1874 to the rectory of Twywell, near Thrapston, Northamptonshire, which he resigned in 1895.

In 1871 the House of Commons appointed a committee to investigate the East African slave trade; Waller and Edmund Murge pushed it to recommend Sir John Kirk as permanent political agent at Zanzibar.

Horace Waller, standing, with Henry Rowley, UMCA missionary, in a photograph of the 1860s