Maurice S. Evans
Maurice Smethurst Evans CMG (30 July 1854 – 9 April 1920) was a South African politician, author, and botanist.
Contents
Biography
Family and origin
Maurice Smethurst Evans was born in Manchester, England, the eldest son of Edward Huddlestone Evans. In 1875 he traveled to Natal as a businessman and settled in Durban. In 1886, he married Elizabeth Fairweather Murray of Edinburgh.
Botanist
Evans was interested in botany and published several articles in Nature (1876, 1878, 1895) on plants occurring in Natal and their fertilization. In 1878, he became a member of the newly founded Natal Microscopical Society and from 1885 was on the committee of the planned Durban Natural History Museum.
In 1894 Evans undertook an expedition to explore caves formerly inhabited by San bushmen in the Drakensberg Mountains in the headwaters of the Boesmans River. In the process, he also collected plants, many of them as yet undescribed. In all, by 1897, he had donated some 800 specimens originating from Natal and Zululand to the Natal Herbarium. At Evans' suggestion, John Medley Wood, head of the herbarium, published the six-part Natal Plants series from 1899 to 1912. Evans co-authored the first volume and provided funding.
Evans belonged to South African scientific organizations such as the South African Philosophical Society, the Royal Society of South Africa, and the South African Biological Society. He was also a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and the Royal Geographical Society.
The plant species Kniphofia evansii, Sebaea evansii, and Senecio evansii were named in his honor.[1]
Politician
Evans was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Natal in 1897. In 1897/1898, he sat on the Durban City Council, and in 1906 he entered Parliament for Durban. The focus of his political interests was the indigenous inhabitants of the colony of Natal and relations between the various South African population groups. He played an important role in establishing the policy of racial segregation in South Africa.[3]
Works
- Natal Plants: Descriptions and Figures of Natal Indigenous Plants (1898)
- The Problem of Production in Natal (1905)
- The Native Problem in Natal (1906)
- Black and White in South East Africa. A Study in Sociology (1911)
- Natal, Rhodesien, Britisch-Ostafrika (1913)
- Studies in the Southern States from a South African Point of View (1913)
- Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View (1915)
Notes
- ↑ "Evans, Maurice Smethurst". In: Mary Gunn, L. E. W. Codd, Botanical Exploration Southern Africa. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, p. 152.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Herbin-Triant, Elizabeth A. (2013). "Southern Segregation South Africa–Style: Maurice Evans, Clarence Poe, and the Ideology of Rural Segregation," Agricultural History, Vol. LXXXVII, No. 2, pp. 170–93.
External links
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