The beginnings of written literatures among the indigenous peoples of southern Africa are rooted in the nineteenth century, a period of intensive and extensive missionary activity in that region. As the word made visible, writing was ushered in by translations of Bible tracts, followed at a slower but steady pace, by the Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The writer most likely to be published was one who advocated the abandonment of indigenous customs and cultures and the acceptance of their rivals from the west. A typical and much quoted example is that of Thomas Mofolo’s Moeti oa Bochabela (Sesotho, 1907) (Traveller of the East), which described the premissionary Lesotho as a place steeped in darkness in which “people ate each other like the animals of the veld,” and was accepted with great enthusiasm by the Paris Evangelical Mission Society, while Chaka (Sesotho, 1925), a much superior work artistically, was kept from publication for a long time by the same missionary group because they did not like its message. Typically, in Moeti oa Bochabela, Mofolo created a protagonist, Fekisi, who rejects his people and their customs, and undertakes a journey similar to that of Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Fekisi’s “escape” from his culture is replayed over and over as African-language writers simulate Bunyan’s hero, especially in the early missionary period.