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.
