Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

tini’s testimony 155
Stech had been a missionary in South Africa for almost twenty years.
Over the years, several accounts from his diaries had been published
in the Missionsberichte. 6 An extramarital relation with a servant girl
of ambiguous racial lineage was, however, not the type of activity he
would have informed his superiors of. Neither could it be expected
that the obligation of diary keeping would have barred men from
participating in activities they would prefer not to report on. This
tradition of thorough reporting did, nevertheless, compel Stech’s
colleagues to scrupulously collect and pass on information about the
incident to Director HT Wangemann in Berlin. In their attempts to
explain the situation in the Soutpansberg to Wangemann as clearly as
possible from their particular vantage points, the ‘stakeholders’ in
this tragic sequence of events also reveal a lot about the inner
workings of Soutpansberg society at the time; the interaction
between German missionaries, 7 African converts and ‘non-converts’,
Boer farmers and townspeople as well as Transvaal traders, artisans
and businessmen who originated from various parts of Europe.
Missionary activities created a converging space for people from all
walks of life. From their writings we can deduce much about the
confluence of, often conflicting, constructions of race, class and
gender at the time. This paper only begins to explore the possible rich
harvest a close reading of the missionaries’ correspondence may
yield. 8
The most matter-of-fact account of the unhappy events in
Soutpansberg between 1888 and 1891 is provided by Superintendent
Krause, who compiled and presented all the evidence to Director
Wangemann. The girl who was accusing Stech of having impregnated
her was one of three children, the youngest daughter of a certain
Fisher/Fischer (an Englishman, or probably of other European
descent). His wife, Christine, was an inhabitant of Carl Beuster’s
mission station, Modimolle, in Waterberg. She was an ‘honourable’
and ‘very pale’ coloured woman. The significance of these markers of
character and complexion Krause deems necessary in his description,
6 See, for example, Berliner Missionsberichte (1880) 208, 357-371.
7 For a thorough investigation into the family history of the Berlin Society’s
missionaries in South Africa, see, L Zöllner & JA Heese Die Berlynse sendelinge in
Suid-Afrika en hulle nageslag/The Berlin missionaries in South Africa and their
descendents (1984).
8
In this pursuit I find Laurel Graham’s ‘feminist intertextual deconstruction’ a very
useful approach. It entails ‘looking for contradictions within or between texts
that illustrate the pervasive effects of patriarchy and capitalism’. As Graham
explains: ‘Dominant texts need to be deconstructed in order to make sense of the
specific ways texts teach their audiences to structure personal systems of
meaning. Through deconstruction, readers can find in each text the information
to construct oppositional readings.’ See L Graham ‘A year in the life of Dr Lillian
Moller Gilbreth: Four representations of the struggle of a woman scientist’
unpublished paper presented at the Gregory Stone Symposium, St. Petersburg
Beach, Florida, January 1990 3-4 quoted in S Reinharz Feminist methods in social
research (1992) 148-149.