British linguist and Anglican missionary
Arthur Cornwallis Madan (1846–1917) was a British linguist and Anglican missionary who became famous for his research on African languages and his Swahili dictionaries.
Family background and education.
Madan was born on 8 March 1846 in the parish of Cam, Gloucestershire, England, as the third child of the Anglican pastor George Madan. He was educated at Marlborough College and studied at Christ Church, Oxford from 1865 to 1869.
After obtaining his bachelor's degree, he taught at Christ Church as a tutor from 1870 to 1880; during this period he also got a master's degree. He joined the Universities' Mission to Central Africa.
Work in Africa.
In 1880 he was sent to Zanzibar, where he learned Swahili and assisted bishop Edward Steere in his language research and translation work. When Steere died in August 1882, Madan finished Steere's manuscript of a Swahili grammar until the end of the year. ("A handbook of the Swahili language as spoken at Zanzibar, edited for the Universities' Mission to Central Africa").
Madan was considered the mission's chief linguist in East Africa. He continued to work on Swahili dictionaries. Initially this was a pioneer's work, as Ludwig Krapf's dictionary of Swahili, the first for this language, had not yet been published. In 1894 Madan's English-Swahili dictionary was published, followed by a Swahili-English dictionary in 1903.
1906 Madan moved to Northern Rhodesia (today: Zambia), where he continued researching a number of African languages like Lenje and Wisa. In 1911 he returned to Oxford, where he taught until his death in 1917.
Legacy.
He is remembered mostly for his dictionaries and other writings about the Swahili language. His dictionaries became the base for the Standard English-Swahili Dictionary and Standard Swahili-English Dictionary, which are known under the name of "Madan-Johnson".