Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Eight / tini’s testimony: the
significance of a
meticulously recorded case
of sexual abuse on a
transvaal mission station,
1
1888 1893 Lize Kriel
In December 1891 the Director of the Berlin Mission Society (BMS)
received an alarming report from the Superintendent of the Northern
Transvaal Synod, Oswald Krause. He informed the Director in
Germany that the whole Soutpansberg, the northern-most District of
the Boer Republic, was resounding ‘from Pietersburg to the Blue
Mountains’ with a nasty tale of gossip. 2
Pietersburg (present-day Polokwane) had been formally proclaimed as
a town less than a decade before. It was growing fast as the
communications and business hub of the Soutpansberg since promises
of great mineral wealth in the district had made land speculation a
lucrative endeavour. Furthermore, in an effort to give greater
credence to their claim to supremacy over the populous and still
largely independently-acting African communities in the region, the
Pretoria government had embarked upon a so-called ‘occupation
system’ in 1886. Land was allocated free of charge to white occupants
on condition that they should actively cultivate the farms and
1 This paper was previously published in (2004) 21 Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift
271. It is an exploratory study and part of a larger project on women on mission
stations in the Soutpansberg in the late nineteenth-century, conducted in
collaboration with Annekie Joubert, Humboldt Universität, Berlin. My sincere
appreciation to Heike Beyer, also from Humboldt, for painstakingly transcribing
the documentation in Stech’s Disciplinary File in the Kirchliches Archivzentrum in
Kreutzberg, from the old Süterlin text into an electronic version of Times New
Roman. This research is funded by a generous grant from the Research
Develompent Fund, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
2 Evangelisches Archivzentrum, Berlin: Berliner Missionsgesellschaft (EA BMG):
Disziplinaruntersuchung gegen Missionar C Stech, 1891-1893 (herafter EA BMG
Gegen Stech), BMW 1/4225 6-7: O Krause, Modimolle – HT Wangemann, Berlin, 30
Dezember 1891.
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