In order to understand how the Hermannsburgers positioned themselves in relation to Bantu Education it is necessary to provide a picture of who they were, their relationships with other Lutherans and the approach they took to politics, since this defined their approach to education.

Who were the Hermannsburgers?

The Hermannsburg Mission was one of the smaller, Lutheran, German societies founded by Louis Harms in Hermannsburg, a small village in a picturesque but rural and agricultural area in northern Germany known as the Lüneberger Heide. Its missionaries arrived in British colonial Natal in 1854. The Hermannsburg Mission has been described as a Bauernmission – a mission of peasants, or plattelanders. Although they shared a highly gendered, patriarchal social organisation with the Berlin Mission, they differed in their social origins and theology. They were from humble rural agricultural and artisanal backgrounds, and not from the aristocratic, military or civil service, the upper strata of Prussian society. Unlike the Prussian Berlin Mission Society, whose Lutheranism was an amalgam of Lutheranism with the Calvinism of the state church, the Hermannsburgers chose a more ‘original’ form of Lutheranism.

Support for mission work for both Hermannsburgers and the Berlin Mission came from country districts, where the influence of the pietist movement that had spread across Protestant Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was strong. Its ‘simple piety’ corresponded to Methodism or non-conformism in Britain and was characterised by an ‘avers[ion] to orthodoxy and dogmatism in the Church’.

Once ordained and sent out to South Africa, missionaries were sent to a mission station for a year to learn the local language, either Zulu or Tswana, and then given a posting either in the Marico or Magaliesburg district in the Western Transvaal or the Zulu mission in Natal. Missionaries were normally accompanied and assisted by their wives, usually women within and drawn from the Hermannsburg community. The majority of missionaries were not highly educated, and had attended their local village schools. None were trained teachers. Yet they established a network of mission stations with satellite outstations in Natal, Zululand and the Western Transvaal, on land granted either by chiefs, the Natal colonial government, or the President of the Zuid- Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR).