Robert Moffat

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.