Biography

Swiss missionary and ethnographer. Henri-Alexandre Junod came from a family of pastors and missionaries and was ordained as a protestant minister in the Independent Church of Neuchâtel in 1885. After being accepted as a missionary candidate by the Romande Mission, he went to Edinburgh to study English and medicine. On his return to Switzerland he was sent to Mozambique, remaining from June 1889 until July 1896, with occasional leave in South Africa where he collected some of his earliest African specimens around Pinetown and Howick, in KwaZulu-Natal. His first posting was in Rikatla, about 30 km north of Lourenço Marques. Here, outside his duties, he devoted his time to learning the local languages and to his collection of insects, beetles, and plants. In 1893 he became principal of the mission's school for evangelists, when it was transferred from Valdezia, in northern Transvaal, and the following year he took over the direction of the mission station at Lourenço Marques. Lord James Bryce visited him in 1895 on his tour of southern Africa and persuaded him to send ethnographic data to the British social anthropologist James Frazer.

Junod had collected plants and insects since childhood, encouraged by his father, who taught him about the uses of herbs, and was ahead of his time in his use of African informants for his botanical and entomological studies. After meeting Bryce his interest turned from natural history, which had dominated his early years in Africa, to ethnography. He began to collect material about Tsonga culture, as a record of the past for the benefit of future generations, and as an aid to contemporary administrators and missionaries, believing himself to be a witness to the end of traditional ways of life. During three years' furlough in Switzerland, he published a Ronga grammar (1896), an anthology of Ronga stories (1897), and most importantly for establishing his reputation as an anthropologist, Les ba-Ronga: étude éthnographique, considered one of the best ethnographic publications of its time.

The majority of his African plant collections were made at Rikatla and at Shivulane where he built and ran an evangelist school between 1898 and 1906. He kept a hut outside the mission station at Shivulane on Mt Momotsuiri and collected in the neighbouring mountains. He also collected with Dr L. Jacottet on Mt Macheche, and elsewhere in Lesotho, on his way back to Switzerland in 1903. He returned to Shivulane within a year with his second wife, Helene Kern-de Schultess, a former missionary aide in Congo, and is recorded as having visited the Natural Sciences Society in Johannesburg in 1905. In 1907 the couple moved to Rikatla to reopen the evangelical school, which had been destroyed during the Ronda-Portuguese War (1894-1895).

From 1909 until 1913 he was on leave in Switzerland producing The Life of a South African Tribe, which won him an honorary fellowship from the Royal Anthropological Institute, and his only novel, Zidji: Étude de Moeurs Sud-Africaines. He then returned to Rikatla until 1920, staying on for three years after the death of his wife. During this period he spent much of his time studying, travelling, and attending conferences, including visits to the Transvaal. In his remaining years he wrote and gave lectures on his African studies. He acted as an agent of the Swiss mission in Africa and wrote a biography of its two founders, one of them his brother-in-law Paul Berthoud. He served as president of the International Bureau for the Defence of Aborigines and as a consultant for the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. As a naturalist he made many new discoveries and is commemorated in the genus Junodia Pax in the Euphorbiaceae. Amongst the many African plants named after him are Cyrtanthus junodii Beauverd, Crotalaria junodiana Schinz ex Baker f. (= Crotalaria laburnoides Klotzsch), Ischaemum junodii Hack., Muraltia junodii Burtt Davy and the Basidiomycete fungus Diplocystis junodii Pole-Evans & Bottomley. He is also commemorated by zoological names including several butterflies.

Sources:
B.L. Michler, 2003, Biographical Study of HA Junod: The Fictional Dimension, MA thesis, University of Pretoria
1972, Dictionary of South African Biography.