This is Part One of a two-part series.
The call of George Schmidt
On the last day of March, two men, one a European missionary on horseback, and the other an African walking on the trail that led into the hinterland, were making their way back to a country village, the establishment of which would become the saving grace of South Africa’s indigenous people.
It was 1742. This year marked seven grueling years since the pioneering Moravian missionary, George Schmidt, arrived in South Africa on God’s instructions to share God’s word with the KhoiSan people, the people who were the aboriginal population of the land that was later to become South Africa.
Schmidt was born in 1709 to peasants in Kunewalde in the German-speaking part of Moravia, which today forms part of the Czech Republic. At the age of 16, he converted to Christianity. On his first evangelistic mission for the Moravians in 1728, under the leadership of the legendary Count von Zinzendorf of Hernnhut, he was arrested and imprisoned for six years in Bohemia because he had breached the Roman Catholic Church’s laws in that country.
While incarcerated, Schmidt had a revelation that he should become a missionary to a specific group of people who had long inhabited a particular part of the South African Cape, until the Dutch had taken it from them. Two years after his release, he answered a call from the Moravian Church to become a missionary to South Africa’s indigenous people who had no awareness of the gospel.
The story of Schmidt’s travails in Africa are recorded in his diary, today a very rare and valuable book. In that diary, Schmidt recalls how the Dutch colonists derided and made fun of him when he arrived by ship in the Cape in 1737 to start the first Protestant mission station in Southern Africa. They could not believe he was earnest about sharing the word of God with people they thought of as stinking savages, let alone baptize them.
Good intentions by settlers, such as establishing a small presence on foreign shores, can change when they realize how their occupation could be expanded.
The beginnings of South Africa
The Dutch arrived at the Cape in 1652, ostensibly to build a halfway station that would service the trading fleets they were operating between the Netherlands and the East Indies (Indonesia). However, as history has taught us, good intentions by settlers, such as establishing a small presence on foreign shores, can change when they realize how their occupation could be expanded and, to use a modern word that the indigenous people certainly did not have an equivalent for, monetized.
Initially the indigenous people sold livestock to these strangers. Actually, sold is an overstatement. What really took place was a mere exchange of valueless trinkets for costly livestock. This regular supply of fresh meat ensured the survival of the strange visitors.
Apprehension about the presence of the Europeans increased when it dawned on the aboriginals that the occupation of their land was a permanent one. To secure the land that they already had taken, the Dutch established a treeline barrier to keep out the locals who had traditionally brought their livestock to feed on the Cape’s winter grass.
Seven years after Dutch navigator Jan van Riebeeck and his fleet of three ships landed at Table Bay to begin what would become the first permanent European presence at the Cape, the aboriginal people attempted to reclaim their ancestral grazing lands. Between 1659 and 1677 they fought in vain to keep their land. But in 1677, after 18 years of one war campaign after another in addition to brief skirmishes, they were finally overcome and forced to seek terms for peace.
Unwittingly, the Dutch had an ally that decimated the KhoiSan and made their defeat complete. The deadly small pox disease infiltrated the Cape in the February of 1713 on dirty and infected linen that was brought ashore to be washed. The plague affected the white population, but because they had no resistance to this white man’s disease, the KhoiSan were all but wiped out. Seeing the opportunity, settler farmers then steadily started to occupy the empty land where the KhoiSan had once lived.
The Valley of Grace
God sent George Schmidt to the remnants of this devastated, defeated people. The assignment was a tough and demanding one that would have broken others who were not as committed to their calling. In 1738, he arrived to find himself among aboriginal people who did not know his God and had no idea of the European practice of living in solid dwellings.
The KhoiSan lived in huts that could be easily dismantled and moved to another place, as they continually drove their livestock to greener grazing grounds. They also loved dancing at night. They were not teetotallers either. They distilled their own alcohol, sometimes using honeycomb. They spoke a language with unfamiliar click sounds and were illiterate, yet brilliant at reading nature, understanding the behavior of animals, and hunting.
The KhoiSan often exasperated Schmidt by regularly disappearing from the picturesque mission station which he founded called Genadendal or Valley of Grace. For four long years this pioneer missionary faithfully served them. He taught them to cultivate vegetables, read, sing hymns and shared his faith with them. Still, not one of them ever took the final step to turn away from their ancient beliefs and accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Schmidt’s breakthrough came in March 1742 when he was returning home from a trip. He engaged his KhoiSan companion, whom he called Wilhelm, in a conversation about Jesus Christ. In his diary Schmidt recounted how he asked Wilhelm if he wanted to be baptized.
Do you want to be baptized?” “Please, Sir.” came the reply.
The reply was an unambiguous and firm “Yes”. Schmidt explained the significance, symbolism and life-changing meaning of the Christian baptism to Wilhelm. They came upon running water. Schmidt dismounted from his horse, knelt, and invited Wilhelm to kneel next to him. They prayed.
There, under African skies, Schmidt asked Wilhelm, “Do you believe that the Son of God died on the cross for the sins of all people? Yes. Do you want to be baptized?” “Please, Sir.” came the reply.
Schmidt requested that Wilhelm enter the water. In his diary, he recounts, “I baptized him in the name of the Son of God who died for us, the Father, and the Holy Spirit.” Wilhelm took the new name Joshua.
By this account the first southern African Christian was poignantly baptized—in autumn, out in the veld, by a missionary God sent from Europe to the southern tip of Africa to shepherd the indigenous people to Himself.
Schmidt also writes in his diary how later in 1742, he asked a KhoiSan woman if she wanted to be baptized in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Schmidt explained more to her about the sacrament of baptism. Then, according to his diary, Schmidt walked to nearby water and baptized her. She too received a new name: Magdalena, and became the first indigenous woman to accept Jesus Christ. She stood firm as a beacon and follower of Christ throughout her life.
An indigenous church
Together Joshua, Magdalena, Christian (formerly, Africo), Christina, and Jonas (formerly, Kybbodo), who is my ancestor, became “the first five”. The first indigenous people who accepted the gospel. Their historic baptisms, however, were the beginning of the end for Schmidt’s ministry. He made the mistake of calling the African converts to Christianity his brothers and sisters and he also lived amongst them. The all-white and whites-only Dutch Reformed Church was deeply aggrieved that he had baptized these heathen and angry that he dared serve holy communion to them.
Trumped up charges were manufactured against him. Among the flimsy allegations were accusations that his ringing of church bells on Sundays to call his flock to church disturbed farmers in the town of Stellenbosch—which was completely impossible because a towering mountain range and many miles separated Genadendal from Stellenbosch! He was also charged with not being an ordained minister. Furthermore, there were murmurings that the KhoiSan did not need Christ.
George Schmidt was eventually forced to leave his treasured Genadendal and the 28 people who came to Christ during his time there. The day he left, Schmidt handed his New Testament to Magdalena, the first female convert, who was to become a champion of the faith. On August 1, 1785, George Schmidt died while kneeling in prayer for the congregation he was forced to abandon more than five and half thousand miles away in southern Africa.
In the meantime, in the isolation of the Valley of Grace, Magdalena gathered around her those who believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and taught them from the small New Testament that Schmidt had bequeathed. Sharing the gospel of Christ was not the only gift that Schmidt brought to the KhoiSan. He imparted the priceless gifts of reading and writing to them too. Thus Magdalena could read and encourage those around her.
It is said that Magdalena and her people received a vision that God would again send missionaries to them and they waited, faithfully and expectantly. It was to be another 48 years before three Moravian missionaries eventually came and found Magdalena sitting under a pear tree, with Schmidt’s New Testament, teaching her people.
Today that little leather-bound book is in the Genadendal Museum as a reminder of the grace bestowed on the KhoiSan, the first people of the country of South Africa.
Many years after Georg Schmidt, the first missionary in southern Africa, was forced to abandon Genadendal, or the Valley of Grace, the village was flourishing. Under the spiritual guidance of Moravian missionaries, and due to the diligence of the offspring of the indigenous people and others who had been lured to its tranquil surroundings and Christian lifestyle, Genadendal stood out as a haven of hope.
It became known as the Athens of southern Africa. The settlement launched South Africa’s first teachers’ college, produced the country’s first qualified teacher, played a pivotal foundational role in the development of the Afrikaans language; and produced the first newspaper printed in Afrikaans in the country.
But by 1910 it began to feel a political squeeze, eight years after the conclusion of what the English call the Boer War.
The invention of racial segregation
1910 was the year in which the four separate white-run entities, the Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Natal, and Transvaal united under British rule to form the Union of South Africa. Apartheid was officially recognized in 1948, becoming rapidly embedded in the nation’s social systems. South Africa eventually separated from Britain and formed the apartheid Republic of South Africa in 1961—a government voted for by the white minority, who controlled the Republic from its inception. People who were not white did not have the right to participate in election processes.
The South African Native Congress, later renamed African National Congress or ANC, was formed in 1912. In 1960, the ANC and other anti-government organizations, were outlawed and went into exile. They waged an armed struggle against the government. From its inception, the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, recruited members from all of South Africa’s different race groups.
As the years passed, the ANC emerged as the premier liberation movement. Lawyer Oliver Tambo was its president in exile, while Nelson Mandela, his former partner in their law firm, served a life sentence on Robben Island, South Africa’s infamous jail for black male political prisoners. These were committed Christian leaders fiercely committed to nonracialism, even in the face of apartheid, a heinous policy labelled by the UN as a crime against humanity.
Yet, not even the eventual victory of the ANC provided relief for the descendants of the KhoiSan.
Our story continues in Part Two here...
Dennis Cruywagen is an acclaimed South African journalist and political commentator, as well as a former parliamentary spokesperson for the ANC. He previously served as deputy editor of the Pretoria News and a political reporter on the Cape Argus. He is a recipient of a Nieman Fellowship and a Mason Fellowship at Harvard University, and holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of "Brothers in War and Peace", a detailed look at the lives of Abraham and Constand Viljoen; as well as "The Spiritual Mandela".
