A German-Christian Network of Letters in Colonial Africa as a Repository for ‘Ordinary’ Biographies of Women, 1931–1967

Abstract

This study explores the possibilities of extracting biographies of ‘ordinary Africans’, especially women, from the epistolary networks of a transcontinental Lutheran community of readers. Due to the enthusiastic efforts of a number of German deaconesses, women from British colonial Africa whose narrations might otherwise not have been recorded, participated in conversations with women in Nazi, and thereafter West as well as East Germany. Mission evidence supports the argument that in colonial Africa religion opened up one of the few spaces for African and European women to collaborate in an otherwise segregated society. While the network was initiated in the name of their common faith and sustained with German church funding (and British colonial infrastructure), the content of the letters was far from restricted to religious matters. The article contends that these epistles reflected an awareness amongst rural female African participants of their position in a much larger geopolitical space – and even a world church. Thus the label ‘ordinary’ refers to the status of the African women writers in their local communities and church congregations rather than their horizons of expectation. Their fragmentary biographies or life-histories, from both colonial Tanganyika and the Transvaal, need to be viewed within the context of their interaction with their German facilitators and the members of the female Christian reading community in Europe – who were the intended audience envisaged by the African women narrators.

Notes

¹ J. Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (London, Routledge, 2008), p. 16.

² H. Lehmann, Zur Zeit und zur Unzeit. Geschichte der Berliner Mission 1918–1972 III (Berlin, Berliner Missionswerk, 1989), p. 909, provides a list of the most prominent periodicals in Germany. Besides the ones published by the Berlin Missionary Society specifically – Berliner Missionsberichte (1833–1940), Der Ruf (1953–1975) – there were also several which promoted missionary work in general, amongst others: Evangelische Missionszeitschrift (1940–1973), Mission und Unterricht (1913–1940), Mission und Pfarrampt (1908–1941), Der Missionsfreund (1846–1939) and Die Deutschen Evangelischen Heidenmissionen (est. 1925).

³ Isabel Hofmeyr has written graphically about the ‘Congo mimicry’ of the Camden Road Baptists in England. See I. Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan. A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2004), p. 52: ‘Letters and articles from missionaries personalised these converts for a home audience’.

⁴ T. Johannsmeier, ‘Modiro Basading’, Tsupa Mabaka a Kereke (1955), pp. 58–60. Thanks to Bethuel Sathekge for the translation from Northern Sotho into English.

⁵ See, for example: D. Gaitskell, ‘Female Faith and the Politics of the Personal: Five Mission Encounters in Twentieth-Century South Africa’, Feminist Review, 65 (2000), pp. 68–91; D.L. Robert (ed.), Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers. Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, Orbis, 2002); R.C. Brouwer, Modern Women, Modernising Men:. The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902–69 (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2002).

⁶ E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Vintage, 1993), p. 59.

⁷ The tried and tested methodology of interviewing the elderly for their reminiscences has been deliberately left out of the equation for the purposes of this paper, because of the separate dynamics of the selective discursive processes noted by S. Field, ‘Turning up the Volume: Dialogues about Memory Create Oral Histories’, South African Historical Journal, 60, 2 (2008), p. 180. Ascribing meaning to information obtained through interviews conducted sixty years after the event (and grappling with the role of social memory and historical consciousness in these constructions) on the one hand, differs from the (equally selective and discursive) process of reading the correspondence composed at the time, on the other hand. Merging these two projects will hopefully be attempted in a subsequent stage of this study.

⁸ T. Johannsmeier, ‘Modiro Basading’, Tsupa Mabaka a Kereke (1955), pp. 58–60.

⁹ Of course, especially after their withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1960, South Africa's formal partnership with ‘the British world’ was compromised, but I would argue that what Cox refers to as ‘the British imperial sphere of influence’ had relevance to the history of the Transvaal well beyond this date.

¹⁰ L. Stempin, ‘Das Diakonissen-Mutterhaus Salem-Lichtenrade’, in A. Pfotenhauer & G. Freytag (eds), Zeit aus Gottes Hand: 100 Jahre Schwesterschaft des Diakonissen-Mutterhaus Salem-Licthenrade (Bad Gandersheim, Diakonissen-Verein Salem-Lichtenrade, 2006), pp. 24–28, Diakonissenmutterhaus, < http://www.paulgerhardtstift.de/Diakonissen.php>, retrieved 7 March 2012. Also various interviews with archivist Anneliese Pfotenhauer at the Deaconesses' Mother House Salem Lichtenrade, Bad Gandersheim, Germany, December 2006.

¹¹ See L. Kriel, ‘German Deaconesses and the Patriarchy of the Berlin Mission in Apartheid Transvaal’, Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, 5/6, 17 (2007), pp. 55–75. Also see G. Pakendorf, ‘“For there is no Power but of God”: The Berlin Mission and the Challenges of Colonial South Africa’, Missionalia, 25 (1997), pp. 255–73, for comments on the Berlin missionaries' ‘increasing acceptance of and cooperation’ with ‘the white rulers of the land’ and, simultaneously, a growing distance between these missionaries and their black congregations. He ascribes this to the co-existence of missionary and Boer families as a privileged racial minority over several generations. Workers of the Berlin Mission who arrived in South Africa after the Second World War (the deaconesses amongst them) of course did not share this legacy.

¹² Archives of the Berlin Missionary Society (hereafter BMW): Personal files of Anna Von Waldow and Anneliese Dörfer; K. Fiedler, Christianity and African Culture:Conservative German Protestant Missionaries in Tanzania, 1900–1940 (Leiden, Brill, 1996), pp. 97–103.

¹³ Lehmann, Zur Zeit und zur Unzeit, pp. 649–53 & 737–8.

¹⁴ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna Von Waldow, 1931–1938, Circular 2, 1931.

¹⁵ Lehmann, Zur Zeit und zur Unzeit, p. 652.

¹⁶ BMW 3029: Alice Bühring to Girls' Group in Storkow, 27 November 1956. The mother houses and the Berlin Missionary Society had agreements that they would exchange all correspondence received from sisters.

¹⁷ Lehmann, Zur Zeit und zur Unzeit, pp. 801–812.

¹⁸ G. Griffiths, ‘“Trained to Tell the Truth’: Missionaries, Converts and Narration', in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 152.

¹⁹ Griffiths, ‘Trained to Tell the Truth’, p. 155.

²⁰ G. Griffiths, ‘ “Trained to Tell the Truth’: Missionaries, Converts and Narration', in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 160.

²¹ G. Griffiths, ‘ “Trained to Tell the Truth’: Missionaries, Converts and Narration', in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 171.

²² G. Griffiths, ‘ “Trained to Tell the Truth’: Missionaries, Converts and Narration', in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 155.

²³ W.M. Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Examples of this type or approach which stand out, are N.Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990) and R. Chartier and C. Dauphine, Correspondence: Models of Letter-writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1997). Karin Barber's edited volume, Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006) contains various contributions focusing on letter-writing.

²⁴ J.G. Altman, Epistolarity. Approaches to a Form (Columbus, Ohio State University, 1982), pp. 3–10.

²⁵ And certainly we must not rule out that the African women may have been equally intrigued by their Christian sisters in Europe.

²⁶ J.G. Altman, ‘Graffigny's Epistemology and the Emergence of Third-World Ideology’, in E.C. Goldsmith (ed.), Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1989), pp. 172–203.

²⁷ I. Hofmeyr, ‘The Globe in the Text: Towards a Transnational History of the Book’, African Studies, 46, 1 (2005), p. 9.

²⁸ Gaitskell, ‘Female Faith’, pp. 68–70, in response to Meera Kosambi and Jane Haggis.

²⁹ Hall is quoted by S. Robbins, ‘Women's Work for Women: Gendered Print Culture in American Mission Movement Narratives’, in J. Dankey and W. Wiegand (eds), Women in Print (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 259.

³⁰ BMW 3029, 1934–1953: Half-Year Report, Itete, 1 July–31 December 1938, January 1939 (All translations from Dörfer and Von Waldow's letters by the author, with corrective assistance from Nora Thoma and Klaudia Ringelmann.)

³¹ BMW 3028, 1936–1981: From the Experiences and the Work of Deaconess Anneliese Dörfer, Missionary Sister in Itete/East Africa (Extracts from Letters), Compiled end of 1938.

³² Altman, ‘Graffigny's Epistemology ‘, pp. 182–83, discussing the eighteenth-century novel, Letters of a Peruvian Woman, writes of the heroine, Zilla: ‘She refuses the language of conquest, possession, and triumph that hierarchizes relationships in a self-perpetuating master–slave dichotomy’.

³³ Waana wali can be roughly translated as teenage girls. In Maneromango, Anna von Waldow converted the practice of secluding girls who had reached puberty (Waana wali) into a Christian schooling system for girls in this stage of life. See Fiedler, Christianity and African Culture, pp. 97–103.

³⁴ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8. Circular 8, June 1933.

³⁵ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8. Circular 15, November 1936.

³⁷ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8. Circular 15, November 1936.

³⁹ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8. Circular 15, November 1936.

³⁶ A. Ponsonby, English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century with an Introduction on Diary Writing (London, Methuen, 1923), p. 30.

³⁸ For polyphony and heteroglossia in personal documents, see M. Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 69–70.

⁴⁰ Griffiths, ‘Trained to Tell the Truth’, p. 158.

⁴¹ BMW 1 4346, Circulars of Anna von Waldow, 1931–8. Anna von Waldow, Maneromango, 7 October 1937.

⁴² BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8. Circular 17, December 1937.

⁴³ Griffiths, ‘Trained to Tell the Truth’, p. 167.

⁴⁴ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8. Circular 17, December 1937.

⁴⁵ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8, Circular 17, December 1937.

⁴⁶ BMW 4346: Circulars of Anna von Waldow 1931–8. Circular 17, December 1937

⁴⁷ In her private letters to Berlin, Anneliese Dörfer spent much energy on reporting the betrayal of this world-view by the missionaries of the BMS.

⁴⁸ BMS 4342, Schwester Anna von Waldow 1937–1959, 8 May 1953.

⁴⁹ BMW 4342, Schwester Anna von Waldow 1937–1959, A, Bühring to A. Von Waldow, 2 April 1953, Berlin.

⁵⁰ The Holiness Mission, steeped in a Methodist tradition, was founded in London in 1907 and renamed the International Holiness Mission in 1917. They worked extensively in southern Africa. In 1952 they amalgamated with the Church of the Nazarene. See < http://www.nazarene.org/ministries/administration/archives/history/statement/display.html>(Lenexa, KS, Church of the Nazarene, 2011), retrieved 7 March 2012.

⁵¹ BMW 3028, 1936–1981: A. Dörfer, Botshabelo, to Missionary Inspector A. Oelke, 5 November 1953.

⁵² BMW 3028, 1936–1981: A. Dörfer, Botshabelo, to Missionary Inspector A. Oelke, 5 November 1953

⁵³ BMW 3028, 1936–1981: A. Dörfer, Itete, to Missionary Inspector W. Braun, Berlin, 9 June 1939 (Private Correspondence).

⁵⁴ A. Schultze, In Gottes Namen Hütten bauen (Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, 2005), p. 487.

⁵⁵ BMW 3030: C. Makwela to A. Dörfer, Bad Gandersheim, 14 August 1967. Andrea Schultze, In Gottes Namen, p. 475, quoted extracts from this letter as she found it translated in the station file for the Kreuzburg Mission Station (1939–1967) in the Berlin Mission archives. To her the document was of exceptional value as the only piece of contemporary evidence she was able to find which showed how this congregation experienced their forced removal. Regrettably, the original letter in Northern Sotho seems to have been lost.

⁵⁶ In her study of the BMS and land ownership in South Africa, Schultze criticised the way in which the Superintendent of the Society, in his official report, expressed his admiration for the precision and orderliness with which the apartheid government managed the process, and the disciplined cooperation of the congregation. In an interview with Schultze in the late 1990s, one of the members of the congregation said of the missionaries: ‘They did try to speak for us, but couldn't do much…’ and ‘People were against the removal, but we didn't resist – it's the government’. See Schultze, In Gottes Namen, pp. 490–492.