Berlin Missionary Society

The precursor to the BMS, Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der Evangelischen Missionen unter den Heiden ("Society for the Advancement of the Evangelical Mission among the Heathen"), was founded on 29 February 1824 by a group of eleven pious laymen from the Prussian nobility, with the initial primary aim of raising funding for the training of missionaries.

[9] Further missionaries arrived in 1836–7, with Jacob Ludwig Döhne setting up BMS stations Bethel and Itemba amongst the Xhosa in a part of the Eastern Cape then known as Kaffraria.

Missionaries Alexander Merensky and Heinrich Grützner started work in the northeastern part of the South African Republic in 1860, their first station being at Gerlachshoop on the farm Rietkloof – named after Prussian army general Leopold von Gerlach, one of the founders of the BMS.

In 1880 BMS missionary Johannes Winter established a mission station at Thaba Mosego, the vanquished capital of the Pedi king, Sekhukhune, who had been defeated the year before by an army of British, Boer and Swazi soldiers.

In 1889 a prominent native evangelist, Martinus Sewushane, and around 500 of his followers decided to secede from the Berlin Missionary Society and form the Lutheran Bapedi Church (LBC), asking Winter to join them.

The Berlin missionaries in South Africa, particularly Alexander Merensky, Knothe, Trümpelmann, Schwellnus and Eiselen, contributed to the study of African languages, producing Bible translations and hymnals.

It was at Botshabelo that the missionary R.F Güstav Trümpelmann, with the invaluable assistance of his erstwhile student, Abraham Serote, translated the Bible into Sepedi (Northern Sotho).

Their work was interrupted by the Anglo Boer War, during which BMS missionary Daniel Heese was murdered by members of the Bushveldt Carbineers, an irregular regiment of the British Army.

It was as part of this process that Africans, duly trained and sometimes salaried, were accepted into the Society as teachers, catechists and lay-preachers, the so-called Nationalhelferen or national helpers.

[13] Niklaas Koen, a “Khoikhoi”, was sent by the BMS to Germany in 1875 to further his education at a high school at Ducherow in Pomerania and afterwards to study for the ministry at the Berlin Missionshaus, where he adopted a German version of his name, Klaus Kuhn.

Kuhn qualified as a missionary (he also took lessons as a violinist) and, after becoming engaged to a German woman, Maria Brose, returned to Africa to the mission station Königsberg in Natal – where he married his bride in 1878.

[12] Another gifted African student who had started out with violin lessons and was to follow in Kuhn's footsteps to Ducherow and then the theological seminary in Berlin was one Jan Sekoto.