John Smith Moffat

Author

1835 – 1918

37

Who was John Smith Moffat?

Reverend John Smith Moffat was a British missionary and imperial agent in southern Africa, the son of missionary Robert Moffat and brother-in-law of missionary explorer David Livingstone.

Like his more famous father, John Moffat was a Congregationalist minister affiliated with the London Missionary Society but he became involved in British colonial expansion particularly in Matabeleland, later part of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

His missionary work included helping to start the first mission in Matabeleland in 1859, and in 1865 he took over the running of his father's mission in Kuruman. In 1879 he resigned from the missionary society and joined the British Bechuanaland colonial service. In 1888 at the instigation of Cecil Rhodes he was sent to Matabeleland to use his father's reputation to persuade its king Lobengula to sign a treaty of friendship with Britain and to look favorably on Rhodes' later approach for the Rudd Concession mining rights.

Having succeeded, Moffat discovered later the extent of Rhodes' deception of Lobengula and the deceit behind numerous concessions negotiated by Rhodes' British South Africa Company, BSAC.

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Born
1835
South Africa
Died
1918

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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