William Anderson Soga
His thesis titled "The ethnology of the Bomvanas of Bomvanaland, an aboriginal tribe in South East Africa, with observations upon the climate and diseases of the country, and the methods of treatment in use among the people" was completed at the University of Glasgow in 1895.
[2] Soga was involved in the running of mission stations, building churches, diagnosis and treatment of patients, research and writing.
Soga spent his childhood at Mgwali mission station in Stutterheim, Amathole District which was run by his parents and where most of his siblings were born.
[6] Of Tiyo and Janet Soga's eight children, one named Alexander born between William Anderson and his younger brother John Henderson was stillborn.
[7] Janet and Tiyo's second daughter Frances Maria Anna was born in 1868 in Tutura (Somerville) in the Transkei where the family moved around 1869.
[11] After ten years of building the Mgwali Mission Station and its congregation, the Soga family moved to Tutura in the Transkei in the eastern Cape.
It was around this time that Tiyo and Janet Soga started preparing William, John and Alan to be educated abroad specifically in Glasgow, Scotland.
[11] In 1870 William, now 12 years old, John Henderson (age 10) and Kirkland Allan (age 9) departed from South Africa leaving behind their extended South African family, younger siblings (Isabella McFarlane, Jotello Festiri and Francis Anne), their mother (pregnant with Jessie who was born in June 1870) and their father Tiyo who was very ill at the time and would die on 12 August 1871 without having seen them again.
[12] For their stay in Scotland, Tiyo Soga had entrusted his sons to the care of Mr R.A. Bogue and Dr William Anderson.
His handwritten MD thesis entitled 'The ethnology of the Bomvanas of Bomvanaland, an aboriginal tribe of South East Africa: with observations upon the climate and diseases of the country, and the methods of treatment in use among the people' was submitted on 20 March 1894.
[18] She was to marry Theodore Frederick Dreyer and assisted anthropologist Monica Wilson (née Hunter)[19] with her research work in Pondoland in the early 1930s.
He graduated with a MB ChB from the University of Glasgow in 1912; practised at Elliotdale and subsequently at Idutywa[21] (today Dutywa) in eastern Cape.
[22] It is recorded that in the short time (about a year) that he was at Malan Station, he established six churches, at Ramra, Bikana, Xonya, Shixini and Dadamba.
[28] Dr WA Soga applied to the United Presbyterian Church, Scotland to be reinstated in his ministerial capacity and was appointed as an honorary missionary.
[28] In 2014, Soga was posthumously awarded the Order of Mapungubwe in Silver for "Being a trailblazer in the field of medicine and anthropology for the black generations of South Africa.
