The Berlin Mission in Venda, 1872 to 1908

The Berlin Mission in Venda, 1872 to 1908: an overview

The Berlin Missionary Society worked among the Vhavenda from 1872 to well into the twentieth century. Its first converts were not made by the Germans at all but by Methodists in Natal, its missionaries were mostly bakers, locksmiths and shoemakers turned pastors, one of them a Cape-born man of Khoikhoi descent, and its most important African friend, Khosi Makwarela Mphaphuli, was never baptised. This article follows the mission from the first returning migrant Christians to the stations of the 1900s, and looks at what it did, who did it, and what it took from the people it came to convert. It rests mainly on Alan Kirkaldy’s 2002 doctoral thesis, Capturing the Soul, which reads the Berlin Society’s own archive.

The story

Before the Germans: the Natal converts. Kirkaldy shows that Venda had Christians before it had Berlin missionaries. Johannes Mutshaeni, born about 1840 at Tshiheni in Tshivhase’s country, worked for a Boer, found him a poor example of Christianity, and went on to Pietermaritzburg to earn guns and goods (pp. 106 to 113). There, at a Methodist chapel, he heard the Rev. James Allison of the Edendale mission preach and was baptised Johannes with four other Vhavenda labourers: Piet, who was the son and heir of a gota and is later called Totane; Jacob; Jesaias (Isaiah); and Solomon (pp. 113 to 116). They visited the Lutheran missionary Posselt near Durban, promised each other to return home to preach, and set off with horses and guns; at the Transvaal border officials confiscated the guns and horses, which Africans were forbidden to import (pp. 116 to 117). On their return Tshivhase heard them read from the Book and offered them the region of Tshimbone to live in with their teacher (p. 118). Within a short time Jacob and Jesaias gave up, Solomon, trained by Allison as a “native teacher”, drifted away, and Piet, who became gota after his father died, reverted to his father’s name Totane (pp. 118 to 120). The pressures were those of polygyny, a dead brother’s widow, and the custom that the second of twins was killed; Kirkaldy argues that, with no mission station in Venda, Totane had “no option” but to give way (pp. 121 to 123). Mutshaeni alone stayed orthodox. A fifth convert, David Denga, was converted separately as a labourer in Natal (pp. 125 to 130).

1872: the missionaries arrive. In early 1872 the Berlin missionaries Beyer and Baumbach, coming from Blouberg, called on Makhado, who gave them a guide, Samuel, another earlier convert, and sent them on to his father-in-law Tshivhase (pp. 131 to 134). Samuel brought them to Solomon, and Beyer promised to return. In November 1872 Carl Beuster and Carl Stech came to Tshivhase’s country; Stech fell seriously ill in April 1873 and the mission asked a Christian from Matlala, Joseph, to interpret for him, which sidelined Solomon, who had interpreted until then (pp. 139 to 143). On the second day of Christmas 1872 Mutshaeni walked in, dressed in skins and a soldier’s leather helmet, and told them in broken Dutch that he was a Christian (pp. 135 to 136). Kirkaldy’s point is that the missionaries “were constantly” trying to keep pace with converts who already knew the language, the ruler and the way of the country (p. 132). See Christian missions in Venda and the Spelonken, 1863 to 1895 for the stations and dates.

What happened to the first converts. Berlin’s Lutherans would not accept the Methodist practice of baptising first and judging afterwards; Stech complained that the earlier converts were “the trouble caused by the so-called Christians who were converted and baptised by the Methodists” (pp. 146 to 147). Solomon had died by January 1874 (p. 151). In August 1874 Beuster, with Mutshaeni as witness, formally excommunicated Totane, who by then had a second wife and twins, in front of his councillors, which Kirkaldy reads as a missionary assertion of power over a ruler (pp. 153 to 154); in 1878 the mission recorded that Totane had said he would “stay a heathen” (p. 155). David Denga moved to the mission and Mutshaeni, who had become Beuster’s indispensable interpreter and teacher of Tshivenda, brought his family to Ha-Tshivhase (pp. 155 to 160). Both died of smallpox, Denga in 1876 and Mutshaeni soon after (pp. 161 to 164). The mission made both men heroes of its tracts.

Who the missionaries were. Ten missionaries served in Venda in the nineteenth century (p. 173). The Berlin seminary asked only for an elementary education and a “heart fully converted”, so the candidates were lower-middle-class pietists: of the German-speaking missionaries, two had been bakers, two locksmiths, one a shoemaker, one a builder (pp. 172 to 174, 187 to 190). Kirkaldy argues that mission offered them upward social mobility, which made them embrace the seminary’s paternalistic regime (pp. 186 to 190). Carl Beuster (born 1844), who led the work from 1872 to his death in 1901, translated the liturgy and with Schwellnus and Koen produced the first school reader, the hymn book and Bible stories, and became Vice-Superintendent of the northern districts in 1893 (pp. 174 to 176). Erdmann Schwellnus (born 1841), a Lithuanian farmer’s son, founded Tshakhuma on 14 May 1874, returned in 1904 and retired in 1907 (pp. 178 to 179; see Tshakhuma). All four of Schwellnus’s sons became missionaries. Johann Meister and a colleague named Wedepohl founded a new station at Gunu in Mashonaland in 1892, from Ha-Tshivhase (pp. 183 to 184).

Klaas Koen. The one exception was Klaas Koen, born in 1852 at Haarlem in the Cape to a Christian family of Khoikhoi descent, taken into the house of a missionary at nine, trained in Germany with the support of a benefactor and sent to Venda, where he reached Tshakhuma in April 1876 (pp. 200 to 209). The mission spelt him “Kuhn” and published a tract holding him up as proof that even a “Hottentot” could be reborn in Christ; Kirkaldy notes that the photograph of him used was lightened, so that he looked “German” (pp. 200 to 206). He founded Georgenholtz, in Makwarela’s country, in 1877 and died in February 1883 (pp. 437, 452).

The Mphaphuli case: Makwarela and Georgenholtz. Kirkaldy’s last chapter follows the missionaries and the Mphaphuli house. Khosi Ranwedzi Mphaphuli received Beuster at his capital on 13 December 1875 in a loud, performed scene of abuse that the missionaries read as savagery and that Kirkaldy reads, with Johannes Mutshaeni’s own comment at the time, as a display of royal power aimed partly at Tshivhase; Ranwedzi gave leave for a station not at his own capital but in the lands of his son (pp. 427 to 433). That son, Makwarela, born about 1850, was a ruler the missionaries wrote about at length because he came closest to understanding the gospel: he dressed in European clothes, learned to read and write, learned tailoring, and had met Lobengula’s court (pp. 419 to 427, 437 to 440). He asked Koen for baptism and, the missionaries record, had even chosen the baptismal name Elias, but Koen refused him unless he gave up all but one wife; Kirkaldy calls this “one of the significant missed opportunities for real intercultural exchange” (pp. 447 to 448). By 1882 there were 28 Christians at Georgenholtz (p. 217). Makwarela then drew back, kept people from classes, went to the diamond fields about 1881 to 1882 and, from the time of the wars with his brother Tshikalange and with Tshivhase in the late 1880s, was no longer seen by the missionaries as a candidate; he did not convert, succeeded his father in 1901 and died in April 1928 (pp. 452 to 479; see Makwarela and Ranwedzi). Old Georgenholtz was abandoned in 1899 and a new station opened about 1908, where a son of Makwarela’s was among the first baptised in June 1909; Makwarela would allow only Berlin missionaries in his lands (p. 479). Kirkaldy’s reading of the whole story is that conversion was for Makwarela “only one strategy amongst many” for dealing with Boers, missionaries and succession rivals, and that the missionaries had no room for anything between “heathen” and “Christian” (p. 482). The missionaries accused the Mphaphuli court of ritual cannibalism; Kirkaldy treats that as a missionary discourse and says what matters is that they said it, and we do not repeat the detail.

The mission as a political actor. Nemudzivhadi says Beuster and Wessmann sent secret reports against Makhado to the Boer government (see the missions article above). In 1898 the Berlin missionaries were still closer to the state: Mulaudzi, drawing on Kirkaldy’s 2005 article on their role in internal Venda conflicts and in conflicts with the Republic, says that General Piet Joubert used them as his instrument in isolating Mphephu, that a Berlin missionary advised Tshivhase and other rulers to put up white flags along the road to Nzhelele (the “Witvlag”), and that Mmbidi of the Mphaphuli was sent to Pretoria to be shown the Republic’s guns before he met Mphephu (ch. 5, pp. 113 to 115, 120; see Mmbidi and Mphephu I). Reinhold Wessmann’s own book, written in 1908, describes the same war from the inside: he was the sole European among the Venda when it began, passed on to Joubert what the sub-chiefs told him of Mphephu’s plan, escorted five chiefs to the general at the mission station of Schewasse (Tshivhase), acted as his interpreter, and calls it a bloodless victory for “native advice” that the general was wise enough to take (The Bawenda of the Spelonken, pp. 120 to 124).

A fallen missionary. Wessmann’s later fate matters to this story. In 1905 Christians from Tshakhuma, in a letter signed by eight people and another unsigned, accused him of sexual misconduct towards local women; a hearing on 3 and 4 February 1905 before a panel of his fellow missionaries led by Superintendent Krause treated the complainants, in Kirkaldy’s words, as if they rather than Wessmann were on trial, and a fuller commission in April and May 1905 led to his expulsion from the mission; Stech had also been expelled, in the early 1890s, for sexual misconduct (pp. 174, 177 to 178, 191 to 198). The Society kept the records sealed and, Kirkaldy says, bought Wessmann’s farm to drive him from the district; he settled south of the Luvuvhu in Khosi Masia’s country and died on 20 March 1928 (p. 198). Kirkaldy argues that the mission feared the story would damage its standing with converts and “heathens”, and sees his case, set beside Koen’s, as the Society’s greatest failure set against its greatest success (pp. 198 to 200).

Cautions

This article is an overview built on one scholar’s reading of the Berlin Society’s archive. Kirkaldy’s thesis is a scanned typescript which we read by OCR, so quotations are from a text with misreadings and the page numbers are the thesis’s printed ones; we paraphrase more than we quote. His central argument, that the missionary record is a distorting lens, applies to every fact here: the first converts’ lives, Totane’s and Makwarela’s motives, and the missionaries’ accounts of the Mphaphuli court are all as the missionaries wrote them, filtered through Kirkaldy. We have not read the Berlin Society’s own reports or the German sources, Mathivha’s 1985 study of Berlin mission education at Tshakhuma, or Kirkaldy’s later book version. Wessmann’s book is a missionary’s retelling of his own part in the war of 1898 and says what he wanted its readers to believe. The missionaries’ own language for Africans was often offensive; we have not repeated it. We make no claim about any present-day church or community. The Wessmann and Stech matters are given only as Kirkaldy gives them, and we have left out the details.

Sources and further reading

Alan Kirkaldy, “Capturing the soul: encounters between Berlin missionaries and Tshivenda-speakers in the late nineteenth century”, PhD thesis, University of Cape Town (2002); open access at the UCT repository (scanned copy, read by OCR; printed page numbers cited)
R. Wessmann, The Bawenda of the Spelonken (Transvaal), translated by Leo Weinthal (London: The African World, 1908); Internet Archive scan
Lufuno J. P. Mulaudzi, “Historicising the politics of vhuhosivhuhulu”, DPhil thesis, University of Pretoria (2020), chapter 5, pp. 113 to 121, citing A. Kirkaldy, “An Examination of the Role Played by Berlin Missionaries in Internal Conflicts in the Vhavenda Polity and in Conflicts between the Vhavenda and the ZAR, c. 1870 to 1900”, in H. Stoecker and U. van der Heyden (eds), Mission und Macht im Wandel politischer Orientierungen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), pp. 373 to 378 (not read directly)
M. H. Nemudzivhadi, “The attempts by Makhado to revive the Venda kingdom, 1864-1895”, PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University (1998), as used on our missions overview

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