The African chief converted to Christianity

It is 200 years since the birth of David Livingstone, perhaps the most famous of the missionaries to visit Africa in the 19th Century. But as author and Church historian *STEPHEN TOMKINS explains, the story of an African chief he converted is every bit as incredible as Livingstone's

According to the title of one biography, David Livingstone was "Africa's Greatest Missionary".This is an interesting claim about the Lanarkshire-born man, considering that estimates of the number of people he converted in the course of his 30-year career vary between one and none.The variation is because Livingstone himself wrote off his one convert as a backslider within months of his baptism.

The irony is that this one backslider has a much better claim than Livingstone to be Africa's greatest missionary.
This man on whom Livingstone gave up became a preacher, a leader and a pioneer of adapting Christianity to African life - to the great annoyance of European missionaries.His name was Sechele, and he was the kgosi or chief of the Bakwena tribe, part of the Tswana people, in what is now Botswana.Born in 1812, he was 10 when his father, the previous kgosi, was killed. Two of his uncles divided the tribe between them. Sechele escaped with a few followers into the desert for nine years, and returned to oust one of his uncles.

Editor's Comment
A step in the right direction

It has only been a month since the newly elected government, the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), took power, and there are already a lot of changes. Across different ministries, ministers are hard at work. Following heavy rainfall and storms that hit Francistown recently, the Minister of State Presidency, Moeti Mohwasa, made a commitment that government will assist those affected by the heavy rains. Mohwasa, when addressing the media in...

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