In 1792, three Moravian missionaries arrived at the place where Schmidt (see The impact of foreign missionaries) had preached. There they met Magdalena, one of Schmidt’s converts. Now elderly and blind, Magdalena had kept her Christian faith alive for half a century, without apparent outside help; a younger woman read to her regularly from the Bible Schmidt had given her. The Moravians resolved to found a Christian community on that spot. Later named Genadendal, it was the first of hundreds of mission stations in South Africa. Genadendal was a tightly disciplined and industrious community under the firm, paternal control of German missionaries and enjoyed the favour of many in the colonial elite.
A second kind of mission, less congenial to the authorities, was founded by Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp, an energetic Dutch member of the London Missionary Society (LMS). A brilliant scholar and army officer, Van der Kemp had been dramatically converted to evangelical Christianity after the death of his wife and child in a freak boating accident. Bethelsdorp, the mission station he founded in 1802 near the future Port Elizabeth, would become a powerful symbol in South African history (see A headlong flight).
Many Khoikhoi saw the Bethelsdorp mission station as a refuge from the labour demands of white farmers, who in turn regarded it as a hotbed of Khoisan absconding from their contracted obligations. Nor did the ascetic and scholarly Van der Kemp – indifferent to his clothing, his comfort, and his dignity as a white man in Africa – endear himself to South African whites. He married a fourteen-year old Malagasy slave girl, and campaigned outspokenly against the labour practices of the Boers. By his death in 1811 he had baptised more than 100 Khoisan, but had also established a pattern of tension between the LMS and white settlers that would last for a century.
Van der Kemp’s political radicalism, though not his unconventional lifestyle, was perpetuated by Dr John Philip, superintendent of the LMS, who dominated the racial politics of southern Africa from the 1820s to the 1840s. Philip contended for the equal legal rights of Khoisan and whites within the Cape Colony, and advocated strengthening African chiefdoms against the advance of white settlement. With this he earned the century long enmity of white settlers, including some who desired to trek from the Cape Colony to a place ‘where the domination of Doctor Philip is not acknowledged’. A Scottish millworker with a doctorate purchased from Princeton University, Philip was the clearest missionary voice for racial equality, the initiator of a moderate Christian liberalism that would inspire white and black opponents of white domination until the 1950s.
