Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

154 lize kriel
maintain a physical presence on the land. The frontier was closing,
but was still far from closed. 3
Blauberg was the BMS’s mission station — one of eleven in the district
— at the foot of the mountains occupied as stronghold by the
formidable Kgalusi Mmaleboho, leader of the Bahananwa, a northern-
Sotho-speaking community. Despite Blauberg’s apparent remoteness
from the main centres of town life, as well as the more congested
(and contested) areas where significant numbers of new white
‘occupanten’ (occupants) were encroaching on African land, the
profile of the Berlin Missionary fraternity in the Transvaal was simply
too high for rumours of immoral behaviour to be concealed in the
secluded landscape. The Boer community may have been dispersed in
small numbers over a vast area, but horses and wagons traversed the
roads between homesteads, distributing news along the same routes
as goods. Moreover, when people met, they talked and eventually the
stories also reached the missionaries’ ears. Prudent gossipers
informed them of the growing belief among the ‘white people’ that
the missionaries were deliberately trying to cover up what had
happened at Blauberg: that missionary Christian Stech, who had
suspiciously departed for Natal (final destination Germany) with his
wife and children a few weeks previously, had impregnated a young
girl who had served as child carer in the Stech household. 4
The Berlin missionaries were meticulous record keepers. Quarterly
checks on each missionary’s diary, first by his superintendent in the
region and then by the missionary directors in Berlin, was a means of
ensuring painstaking record-keeping of the society’s daily activities
and progress in the conversion of ‘heathens’. From these reports
extracts were selected for publication in the Berliner
Missionsberichte in order to keep donors informed of the worthiness
of the cause they were investing in. This scrutiny which the
missionaries were subjected to, was also exerted as a mechanism of
control over their daily activities. 5 What happened on the station
during the day, had to be accounted for on paper at night. Obviously
the system could not control everything.
3 For a richer contextualisation of life on the frontier and especially around
Blauberg during the 1890s, see JWN Tempelhoff ‘Die okkupasiestelsel in die
distrik Soutpansberg’ (1998) 60 Argiefjaarboek vir Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis; L
Kriel (2002) ‘’n Vergelyking tussen Colin Rae en Christoph Sonntag se weergawes
van die Boer-Hananwa-oorlog van 1894’ unpublished D Phil thesis, University of
Pretoria, 37-75 & 76-102.
4 EA BMG Gegen Stech: BMW 1/4225 5: A Herbst, Makabeng – O Krause,
Superintendent, 10 Dezember 1891.
5
Kriel (n 3 above) 116; DW van der Merwe ‘Die geskiedenis van die Berlynse
Sendinggenootskap in Transvaal 1860-1900’ (1984) 46 Argiefjaarboek vir Suid-
Afrikaanse geskiedenis 18-20. My sincere appreciation to Andrea Schultze for
greatly contributing to my understanding of this system during our conversations
in Berlin in 2001 and 2002.