Alan Butler

Alan John Butler, a Director of the Kuruman Moffat Mission in Kuruman, South Africa, and Canon of Kimberley Cathedral, was a priest who served in the Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman for a major part of the second half of the twentieth century. He was responsible for the restoration of the historic Moffat Mission precinct which became renowned as a conservation area and as a beacon of hope in the troubled last years of Apartheid. He was born in the United Kingdom in 1930 and died at Wimborne on 13 January 2011. He continued the missionary work at Kuruman that was conducted by Reverend Robert Moffat for more than fifty years.

Early training and ministry in South Africa Butler was trained at Kelham Theological College from 1951 and was in due course ordained deacon at Southwark Cathedral in 1956 prior to serving in the Diocese of Bloemfontein in South Africa.

He was ordained priest in Bloemfontein in 1957. In 1960 he transferred to the Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman to serve as a curate at St Cyprian's Cathedral in Kimberley.

Butler commenced his ministry amongst the Tswana of the Northern Cape when Bishop Philip Wheeldon sent him to Kuruman in 1961 as Rector and Director of St Paul's, a vast mission district at the edge of the Kalahari. His wife, Hilda, whom he married at the Moffat Mission Church in Kuruman in 1964, has recalled that "he hitch hiked with one suitcase along a dirt road from Kimberley to Kuruman. The chap who gave him a lift bought him an old Chev car." Butler would serve in the area from 1961 to 1965, doubling up as Director of the Bothithong Mission from 1963 to 1965. "He loved the Northern Cape and her people and said that it was the 'real' Africa."

Bishop Wheeldon appointed Fr Butler as his Honorary Chaplain in 1963–1965.

Botswana Butler was sent by his Bishop in 1965 to Bechuanaland Protectorate (still within the Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman) to the yet-to-be-built Gaborone, a capital city for the anticipated independent state of Botswana. There he was to found and build Trinity Church, an ecumenical venture, as well as being involved in such projects as starting up a Co-op food store and initiating the start of a multi-national school. He was also at one time deputy mayor of Gaborone.

A crowning achievement in 1996 was the return of Moffat's printing press, from the Africana Library in Kimberley, for which he had campaigned tirelessly since taking up Directorship of the Mission.

In 1994, in South Africa's first democratic elections, Butler was asked to be an Electoral Officer for the Northern Cape. He had always been interested in politics and this was, as his wife has put it, "the cherry on the cake." Amongst his other accomplishments were sign-writing and book-binding.