Before becoming one of the most respected missionaries of nineteenth-century southern Africa, Robert Moffat worked as a gardener in Scotland and England. It was in that humble trade that God prepared the man who would translate the whole Bible into an African language for the first time in history.
Born on 21 December 1795 in Ormiston, Scotland, to a modest family raised in strict Presbyterian principles by his mother, Moffat received little formal education. Working as a gardener in England, he met Mary Smith, daughter of his employers in Dukinfield, and, influenced by Methodism, decided to become a missionary. He joined the London Missionary Society in 1816 and, the following year, on 13 January 1817, landed in Cape Town.
In January 1818, Moffat went to live in the village of Chief Jager Afrikaner, feared in the region for raids and cattle theft, succeeding the German missionary Johann Ebner, who had already baptized the chief as Christian Afrikaner in 1815. Over roughly a year living among the people, Moffat deepened his discipleship and teaching of the chief and, in 1819, brought him to Cape Town, presenting him to skeptical settlers as living proof of the gospel’s transforming power.
Moffat married Mary Smith on 27 December 1819, in Cape Town, and the couple headed inland. In 1824, they settled permanently at the Kuruman mission, among the Tswana people, north of the Vaal River. The first years there were marked by hard work and almost no results, nearly a decade without a single lasting convert. Only in 1829 did the services begin to draw crowds, and the first enduring converts appeared.
It was also at Kuruman that Moffat devoted decades to the greatest work of his life: mastering the Setswana language and translating the Scriptures into it. He completed the Gospel of Luke around 1829 and, during a furlough in England between 1839 and 1843, oversaw the printing of the New Testament in Setswana, published in London in 1840, the first complete translation of the New Testament into a sub-Saharan African language. The complete Bible, Old and New Testaments, would only be finished and printed at Kuruman in 1857, after some thirty years of study and labor.
It was during that same stay in London, around 1840, that Moffat met the young David Livingstone, lodged at the same boarding house for missionaries on Aldersgate Street. Describing what he had seen on the plains of the African interior, he encouraged the young man not to settle into an already existing mission station, but to press on into territory not yet reached. Livingstone decided to leave for Africa that same year and, in 1845, married Mary, Moffat’s daughter, becoming his son-in-law.
Historians recognize Moffat’s work as pioneering, but also point to its limits: his translation of the Bible and of Pilgrim’s Progress into Setswana carried the cultural and linguistic assumptions of the European colonizer, and his approach to Tswana customs is described by some researchers as paternalistic, more concerned with replacing local habits with European patterns of agriculture and life than with understanding them in depth. Scholars also note that, despite decades of contact, Moffat never reached a deep understanding of African culture nor a personal closeness with the Tswana comparable to what he had, for example, with the Ndebele king Mzilikazi.
Moffat remained in Africa for 54 years in all, from his arrival to his retirement, returning to England in 1870 with his wife Mary, who died in Brixton the following year, in 1871. He lived for more than another decade, and died on 9 August 1883, in Leigh, Kent, at the age of 87, and was buried at West Norwood Cemetery in London. He left behind a Bible in Setswana, an established mission at Kuruman, and a son-in-law, Livingstone, who would carry forward the cause of the Africa he so loved.