Voices and influences
Robert Moffat
The gardener who spent fifty years at one African station and gave the Tswana people the whole Bible in their own language.
Summary
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- Lived 1795 to 1883, Scottish.
Robert Moffat
- Lived
- 1795 to 1883
- Nation
- Scottish
- Tradition
- Congregationalist
Own words
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The life, in order
The life told as one accountfrom this site's record
Robert Moffat was a Scottish gardener with almost no formal schooling when the London Missionary Society sent him to southern Africa in 1816. His first success was the conversion of Africaner, a Namaqua chief with a price on his head, whom Moffat brought to Cape Town alive to the astonishment of colonists who had assumed the missionary was long dead. In 1821 he settled at Kuruman and stayed for half a century. He learned Setswana from the inside, built a printing press, and translated the entire Bible into it — the New Testament in 1840 and the whole Bible by 1857, the first complete Bible put into an African language in Africa. He also handed on the vision: telling a young doctor named David Livingstone about the smoke of a thousand villages to the north where no missionary had been. Livingstone came, and married Moffat's daughter Mary.