Klaas Koen: identity and belonging in the Berlin Mission Society during the late nineteenth century
- Authors: Kirkaldy, Alan
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/450085 , vital:74881 , https://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/hist/v55n2/v55n2a10.pdf
- Description: Klaas Koen should not have belonged. Of Khoisan descent, he wasn’t German, he wasn’t white, and he came from the “wrong” class background to be a missionary.(Indeed, as Elizabeth Elbourne has demonstrated, by the 1830s, many white settlers in the Cape–and some missionaries–saw the Khoikhoi as being sub-human and dismissed missionary notions of the “reclaimability” of those who converted to Christianity. 1) However, after his training in Berlin, Koen became so German that he sat in tears on his first Christmas at his own mission station in South Africa. There was no Christmas tree decorated with candles in German style. Koen died a “blessed death” in the service of the Berlin Mission Society. A tract was produced about his life. This article examines the life history of this man and explores why the mission society treated him, wrote about him, and remembered him as they did. It also suggests some reasons why the young missionary may have made the choices that he did. It concludes with an examination of some aspects of his posthumous identity.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
- Authors: Kirkaldy, Alan
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/450085 , vital:74881 , https://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/hist/v55n2/v55n2a10.pdf
- Description: Klaas Koen should not have belonged. Of Khoisan descent, he wasn’t German, he wasn’t white, and he came from the “wrong” class background to be a missionary.(Indeed, as Elizabeth Elbourne has demonstrated, by the 1830s, many white settlers in the Cape–and some missionaries–saw the Khoikhoi as being sub-human and dismissed missionary notions of the “reclaimability” of those who converted to Christianity. 1) However, after his training in Berlin, Koen became so German that he sat in tears on his first Christmas at his own mission station in South Africa. There was no Christmas tree decorated with candles in German style. Koen died a “blessed death” in the service of the Berlin Mission Society. A tract was produced about his life. This article examines the life history of this man and explores why the mission society treated him, wrote about him, and remembered him as they did. It also suggests some reasons why the young missionary may have made the choices that he did. It concludes with an examination of some aspects of his posthumous identity.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2010
Converts and conservatives: missionary representations of African rulers in the Northern Transvaal, c. 1870-1900
- Authors: Kirkaldy, Alan , Kriel, Lize
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6146 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003715 , http://www2.unil.ch/lefaitmissionnaire/pages/tables_publi/lfm18_tbl.htm
- Description: During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Berlin Mission Society made strenuous efforts to convert the rulers of the people in whose areas they worked in the Northern Transvaal. In this they were largely unsuccessful. This raises questions about what forces influenced success and failure, and how the missionaries interpreted this. In this article, we interrogate the Berlin Missions Society’s accounts of the life and death of August Makhahane, a ruler of the Vhavenda who converted to Christianity, against the background of the accounts dealing with Matsiokwane Leboho, a ruler of the Bahananwa who did not convert. Through such a comparison, we aim at exploring the contrasted ways in which the Berlin missionaries reported about the two rulers.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
- Authors: Kirkaldy, Alan , Kriel, Lize
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6146 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003715 , http://www2.unil.ch/lefaitmissionnaire/pages/tables_publi/lfm18_tbl.htm
- Description: During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Berlin Mission Society made strenuous efforts to convert the rulers of the people in whose areas they worked in the Northern Transvaal. In this they were largely unsuccessful. This raises questions about what forces influenced success and failure, and how the missionaries interpreted this. In this article, we interrogate the Berlin Missions Society’s accounts of the life and death of August Makhahane, a ruler of the Vhavenda who converted to Christianity, against the background of the accounts dealing with Matsiokwane Leboho, a ruler of the Bahananwa who did not convert. Through such a comparison, we aim at exploring the contrasted ways in which the Berlin missionaries reported about the two rulers.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
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