Stephen Gray Unspoilt places
The clanking centre of the Moffat mission near Kuruman is a real old museum piece – a manual printing press. A cast-iron precision machine, it kept running through most of the 19th century. Then abandoned and shipped to Kimberley, it was exhibited there as a pretty historic item – the contraption on which the first ever Bible translation into an African language was printed, its wheels and inky beds silent.
Thanks to a new South African sense of fitness, red tape has now been cut and the staunch old mammoth returned and commissioned. It stands four-square in the old
schoolroom, cranking out souvenir prints of the surrounding sites. Under the drying lines and pegs, it is like laundry day.
The missionary Robert Moffat, a self-taught printer, had Batswana compositors doing the setting. Working from a limited stock of type, and due to the personal element in Setswana, they were forever running out of the letter “m”. Hard to believe, but in this primitive way was produced an entire Secuana Baebele, as the old orthography had it.
Moffat simply obeyed the lead of Saint Jerome, who devoted his life to translating the Bible from Hebrew into the Latin Vulgate, so that Christianity might penetrate Europe. When Moffat spoke of Africa’s “degraded millions being lifted up to the rank and introduced to the fellowship of European nations” in turn, he meant by the letter set in moveable type.
This press seems more sacred these days than even the preacher’s stand in the church next door. The exhibition around it certainly stresses the power of reading. One
marvellous illustration is of Moses holding up his stone engravings. As Moses was taught literacy by some adopting Egyptians, one gets a strange sense of a cycle being fulfilled: the alphabet returning to Africa, where hieroglyphics were first cut, after all.
Moffat served the Batlaping people under Chief Mothibi on that other, Northern Cape frontier that, because it was less battle-torn, usually receives less attention than the Eastern version. For years he had more children than converts, but the peaceful settlement meant he could be first with the spelling manuals, catechisms and hymn books. Nowadays it is a Shakespeare translation by Sol Plaatje, stories by Bessie Head.
The Kuruman property is in fine working order, beautifully restored in rusty colours
under a forest of syringas, brought from north India by religious workers to shade the living and their dead. Hamilton House, Mary Moffat’s garden, the irrigation system – all a perfect oasis in the Kalahari dunes. Everything is ready for next year’s big one – the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the Hollander missionary, Dr van der Kemp, to establish the London Missionary Society in the Cape in 1799.
Which is more than can be said for another anniversary, that of the rival Wesleyan
Methodists, who this year have the 175th of Samuel Broadbent and Thomas Hodgson’s
outpost with Chief Sefonyela in 1823 – the first ever in the old Transvaal.
On the same trip I spent a whole morning searching for it on the hillside above Witpoort near Wolmaransstad, on the farm Leeuwfontein. Even though the site is a national monument, I could not find it. Thorns and wild cotton, korhaans gunning out of the undergrowth. Local farmers more interested in dipping their bonsmaras. Apparently the commemorative stone has long been vandalised. Of this lost ruin Hodgson once wrote that it was at “the most romantic and delightful situation in Africa”. They did not anchor themselves there with some technology.
The Kuruman Mission, just north of the town of Seodin, and just in the Northern Cape if one takes the road to Upington, is the religious hub of half a million Tswana-speakers.
But what it lives off nowadays is 10 000 tourists a year. Most are on the wild- flower route to Namaqualand. Or at Easter with bikes and bakkies on the Desert Run to
Swakopmund.
And the message has changed too, since the days of awe before the hot lead of the Lord. Today it is education for all, with dignity. A soulful pitstop before facing the burning plains. The cool imprint of text.