Be informed:
Hearing Peace

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray’. We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

(Desmond Tutu)

 

The Missionaries brought the Bible to South Africa. But not all robbed land in return; it was about land acquisition among the Missionaries. Mission stations depended on land ownership with an official title. Co-workers and families wanted to be served.

Not all Missionaries collaborated with the colonisers. One who advocated vehemently for territorial law of the owners, was Heinrich Kallenberg (1821-1901), co-worker of the Berlin Mission from 1863 until 1881. At his counteraction against the violently landgrab of the Europeans in South Africa around 1880, he clearly said: “[The Boers] have shamefully stolen from the Coranna who were accepted merciful in the first time and now the self-same persons are placing their good under the loyalty of the British government…”. That Kallenberg solidarised with the people of the Kora [Coranna] at the river Vaal, led to heavy discordances with the German Mission Society that he was dismissed from the Mission ministry in 1882 after years of fighting for the rights of the Kora and finally demoralized.

 

In his peaceful fought out support for the rights of the Kora, he dealt as diplomatic as possible but without being corruptible: He was caught between four stools of the Kora, Mission Society, Boers and the Englishman who competed with the Boers. His mission reports testify how he identified himself with the Kora towards an united “We” and adopted more and more their point of view. His commitment applied to all Kora, also to them outside his mission congregation.

In a struggle of years, he always got the colonial thorn bushes of injustice disentangled under which the territorial law as well as the right to live of the Kora and other South African ethnic groups damped – until he had to surrender: Boer settlers achieved the displacement of the Kora at the English government. Kallenberg refused to leave the station and left his young assistant at “his people” at least. They have been displaced by a military command, in which deaths occurred. The new colleague was defeated by the Boers. Kallenberg and he have been taxed with rebellion officially. As the Berlin Mission considered their reputation at risk, he has been downgraded to an assistant Missionary through the leadership and then discharged from employment. The area around the station that he had to leave, was still called “Kallenbergs Grond” by the residents. Besides a private farm, that he established now, he founded an independent Mission station respectively a congregation called Morija on governmental ground. Unmarried and without children, he stayed in the country until his death. He left two-thirds of his estate to the Berlin Mission.

 

Using the example of this “upright Missionary”, you can watch like under a burning glass, how mission, colonialism and indigenous can meld to a fatefully community. “For better or for worse” the population of origin of South Africa become prisoners of racialist injustice which can be explained historically by the linking of mission and colonialism. Through all disasters, the message of Jesus Christ as the real deliverer from iniquity, invisible and visible injustice got through to them; in their churches as well as outside.

Prof. Dr. Moritz Fischer