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Biography: Johana of Nigeria

Courtesy of the Hultink Family Foundation, the Cántaro Institute is now the new home for the Reformational Digital Library (formerly known as the Reformational Publishing Project). All rights reserved.

Document: Henry Beets, Johanna of Nigeria: Life and Labors of Johanna Veenstra S.U.M. (Grand Rapids, MI.: Grand Rapids Printing Company, 1937).

Excerpt: The writer of this book became rather intimately acquainted with its heroine, Miss Johanna Veenstra, in the capacity of Director of Missions of her and his denomination. As such he traveled with her considerably, addressing various meetings of the Women’s Missionary Unions of the Christian Reformed Church. As she herself relates in the Preface of her “Pioneering for Christ in the Sudan,” it was on account of his suggestion in the matter that she was led to prepare the book just named. It was also in the columns of the MISSIONARY MONTHLY, of which he is one of the editors, that her articles appeared regularly. When the tidings of her demise reached the homeland, he, at several places, gave memorial addresses, and it was the interest displayed in them, as well as in the articles just named, that led him to entertain the idea of publishing in book form the main contents of her own journalistic contributions. The book sketches her activities to the very end of her life and in the two closing chapters it tells about the fruits of her labors as seen after her demise, and of the workers which are now trying to take her place and continue her work.

Download the Document:
Biography: Johanna of Nigeria – H. Beets.pdf