This is a biographical study of Alexander William Roberts, a Free Church of Scotland missionary educator who in 1883 was posted to the Lovedale Institution at Alice, South Africa. Inspired by the night sky of the southern hemisphere, Roberts became a leading observer of variable stars and an early contributor to the theory of close interacting binary stars. He actively promoted the development of colonial scientific culture and was elected president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913. His teaching career at Lovedale fostered a commitment to the interests of his African students and their communities. In 1920 Roberts was appointed to the South African senate to represent “native” Africans; he also served as senior member of the Native Affairs Commission. Despite his liberal instincts he acquiesced to the movement toward racial segregation as advanced in the Natives (Urban Areas) and Native Administration Acts. Roberts nonetheless militated against the erosion of the Cape non-racial franchise rights; he resigned from the Native Affairs Commission just as the all-white parliament was poised to remove Africans from the common voters’ roll. His engagement with the politics of race interfered with Roberts’s astronomical research. Although he published nearly one hundred papers in scientific journals most of his observational data remained unknown until the Boyden Observatory’s Roberts archive was digitized in 2006. His influence as a mission educator also has been little known, although among his pupils were journalist and academic D.D.T. Jabavu, the physician James Moroka, and Swazi king Sobhuza I.

"[T]his painstakingly researched biography makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of an important historical period. Historians of astronomy will especially appreciate Snedegar’s summation of Roberts’s research methods and his correspondence with other (perhaps less starry-eyed) stargazers." - Isis

"In this biographical study, historian of science Keith Snedegar reassesses a neglected historical figure, the astronomer, missionary educator, and politician Alexander W. Roberts. . . .[T]he text draws on a wide range of published and archival sources housed in the United Kingdom, United States, South Africa, Australia, and the Netherlands. . . .Mission, Science and Race in South Africa is a history of paths not taken in the history of South Africa and the Anglophone Atlantic. It is a unique intellectual history of the emergence of modern South Africa, from the perspective of a man who was ill-suited to participate in its cultural and ideological shifts." - African Studies Quarterly

"Most books on the history of mission education in South Africa mention Alexander William Roberts only in passing or in a footnote. Keith Snedegar, Professor of World History at Utah Valley University, has taken the trouble to study the rich material contained in Roberts’s papers besides that in an impressive number of other collections, and to reconstruct his life’s story. . . . Snedegar does not hide his critical attitude and provides a portrait that shows Roberts’s weaknesses and limitations. His study is a welcome addition to the complex history of South Africa liberalism, but at least as much a contribution to the history of education and the historiography of knowledge and science." - Journal of Ecclesiastical History