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Print depicting The Revd Mr Moffat Preaching to the Bechuana' by Charles Bell. The Reverend Moffat was an important and well known Scottish protestant missionary working in Africa for the London Missionary Society. He was fluent in the Bechuana language Tswana, a language in which he had translated both the catechism and the New Testament and in which he would almost certainly have been delivering the lecture depicted in this print.
Charles Bell accompanied Sir Andrew Smith on his 1834-6 expedition into the 'Interior' and it was during this expedition that Bell and Smith met Moffat and saw him at work. This lithotint would probably have been done from sketches and/ or memory after Bell returned to Scotland in 1847.
Andrew Smith's expedition of 1834-6 to explore the territories to the north of the colony was largely funded by Cape merchants and other interested parties. Bell was sent along as second draughtman with express instructions to record details about the people they came into contact with, to contribute to 'an exact portrait of their life as respects their condition, arts, and policy, their language, their appearance, population, origin, and relation to other tribes, or in general whatever tends to elucidate their disposition or resources as sharers or agents in commerce, or their preparation to receive Christianity.'
Bell's intention was to publish his sketches from this expedition as an album (he even produced an illustrated title page) called 'Scraps from my South African Sketch Books' or in a slightly different arrangement as 'Scraps from the Sketch Books of a Wanderer in Southern Africa'. This print forms part of that proposed publication.
A copy of this print also exists within the Bell Heritage Trust Collection at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The Bechuana are members of the Bantu people based mainly in modern day Botswana in Western South Africa.
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