Biography
Mary Smith was born in 1795, in Dukinfield, Cheshire, England, in a family of gardeners. Her father, James Smith, ran a nursery. She grew up in a devout Nonconformist household, and she was a quiet and capable girl. She attended the local Congregational church. In 1814, a young Scottish gardener named Robert Moffat came to work in her father's nursery. He had been brought up in Scotland and had come to England to find work. He was a plain and earnest man, who was drawn to the missions. He and Mary fell in love. But when he told her family that he planned to be a missionary in Africa, her father forbade the marriage. He did not want his daughter to go to such a dangerous place.
Robert went to Africa in 1816, as a missionary of the London Missionary Society. He settled in South Africa, and he began work among the Tswana people, to the north of the Cape Colony. For three years, he and Mary kept up a correspondence. Her father relented in the end, seeing that she was determined, and he allowed her to go. In 1819, she sailed for Cape Town, at the age of twenty-four, and they were married there, on December 27, 1819.
She was a woman of exceptional strength. She went with her husband to the interior, to the mission station of Kuruman, in the Kalahari, a dry and remote place. They traveled by ox wagon for weeks across the desert. The life was hard. She lived in a mud hut with a thatched roof. She had little furniture and no comforts. She dealt with the heat, the lack of water and the threat of disease and attack. She taught the women to sew and to cook and to read. She ran a school for the children. She bore ten children, of whom several died in infancy. She also had the task of caring for the family during her husband's long absences.
She was one of the pillars of the work at Kuruman. The mission was in a hostile area and was threatened by war between the tribes. She remained at her post. She played a role in the translation of the Bible into Setswana, and she helped her husband. She had a gift for making friends with the African women. She was known for her hospitality. Her home was a stop for travelers, among them David Livingstone, who came to Kuruman in 1841. He fell in love with her eldest daughter, also named Mary, and married her in 1845.
Her daughter's marriage to Livingstone was a source of both joy and sorrow. She saw her daughter go with her husband into the interior, with young children, and suffer much. She was concerned for her welfare. In 1862, her daughter died of fever on the Zambezi. It was a blow. She was deeply grieved. She also lived through the death of several of her other children. She bore these losses with faith.
She had a clear mind and a strong will. She was a woman who was often in poor health, but she did not complain. She served at Kuruman for more than fifty years. She and her husband retired to England in 1870, and she was in a weak state. She died on January 10, 1871, in London, at the age of seventy-five. Her husband lived for another twelve years.
She is one of the many women of the nineteenth-century mission fields who are known only as wives, but who gave their lives to the work. Her life shows that the work of a missionary couple is a shared labor and that the faith of a wife may sustain a whole mission.