A. T. Bryant
A. T. Bryant, born Alfred Thomas Bryant (26 February 1865, London – 19 June 1953, Cambridge), was a British Catholic missionary, linguist and historian who worked in Natal Province and Zululand, South Africa, from the 1880s to the 1920s. He is best known for his work on the Zulu language and early Zulu history.
He studied at Birkbeck College. In 1883, at 18, he moved to Natal and joined the Trappist mission at Mariannhill, where he studied theology, began missionary work, and opened the mission’s first boys’ boarding school. In 1887 he went to Europe and was ordained as a priest in Rome. He celebrated his first Mass at St. Peter’s.
Back in Africa, Bryant spent three years among the Xhosa and Thembu in the Transkei. In 1896, with permission from the British Resident, he established a Catholic mission on the oNgoye range in Zululand, between the Mlalazi and Mhlathuze rivers. He lived there for decades, working closely with Zulu communities.
Bryant is remembered for his Zulu linguistics. He published A Zulu-English Dictionary in 1905, followed by An Abridged English-Zulu Word-book in 1917. He founded Izindaba Zabantu (The People’s News), the first Zulu-language newspaper, in 1903. He also wrote Zulu-language works such as Ukuphila Kwomzimba and Imisebenzi Yamapulazi. His history books Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) and The Zulu People Before the White Man Came (1949) document Zulu history from the sixteenth century to the colonial era.
Bryant studied Zulu medicine and healers; his Zulu Medicine and Medicine Men appeared in 1909 and was reprinted as a book in 1966. He collected plant specimens, many identified by botanist John Medley Wood.
From 1920 to 1923 he was a lecturer and research fellow in Bantu Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he started anthropology courses. He received an honorary Doctor of Literature from the same university in 1939. He later returned to England and died in Cambridge in 1953.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:34 (CET).