Heinrich Schmelen

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Heinrich Schmelen

Johann Heinrich Schmelen , actually Johann Hinrich Schmelen (born  January 7, 1777 in Kassebruch near Bremen ; †  July 26, 1848 in Kommagas , South Africa ) was a missionary of the London Mission Society (LMS) and founder of the Bethanien Mission .

Life

Schmelenhaus in Bethanien

Schmelen came from a middle-class family. To escape military service, he fled to England and came into contact with the London Mission Society through Karl Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf (1773-1859). The meeting with three Nama who had been converted to the Christian faith made such a strong impression on Schmelen that he decided to become a missionary and, after appropriate training , had him sent to southern Africa in 1811 . There Schmelen initially worked under the guidance of Christian Albrecht (1773-1815) in the mission station in Pella .

When a larger group of Orlam left Pella for better grazing grounds and moved across the Oranje , Schmelen joined them. At “the permanent spring that cannot be closed with a stone” - on Khoekhoegowab ǀUiǂgandes , called Klipfontein in Afrikaans - they found a new settlement. Schmelen named the place Bethanien in reference to the biblical place where Jesus was baptized and built the second stone house built by Europeans in the area of South West Africa , the so-called Schmelenhaus , here in 1814 , which can still be visited today. The Orlam resident here were accordingly referred to in the literature as the Bethanians . Despite initially successful missionary work, the increasingly warlike and predatory behavior of the Orlam led to a falling out with Schmelen, so that in 1822 he ended his missionary work in Bethanien.

During longer exploratory expeditions through South West Africa, which took him under the most difficult of conditions to Walvis Bay and Windhoek , he was one of the first Europeans to learn the language of the local Nama population. As a result, Schmelen finally took on the task of translating the New Testament into Khoekhoegowab . The pastor he knew, Christian Albrecht, had already started translating the Gospel of Matthew in 1815 . When the translation work was resumed, his Khoekhoegowab-speaking wife Zara Schmelen, née Hendriks (around 1793–1831), whom he met in 1813 and married in 1814, took over a large part of the work because she was very linguistically gifted. For a short time only, from 1817 to 1818, all missionaries who had married a local woman were suspended from the London Mission Society. Although the mission society was fundamentally not racist, Schmelen and other affected persons had to do a lot of persuasion so that the rules were changed and suspensions lifted. Heinrich and Zara Schmelen had four children of their own.

In 1831, after seven years of work, the four Gospels were completed, and the commission was largely fulfilled. Only months later, Schmelen's wife died near Tulbagh . The Gospels were printed in 1832 thanks to the support of the British Bible Society at the Cape. Schmelen took over the management of the mission station in Kommagas (south of Springbok), where he died in 1848. Schmelen's daughter Johanna (Hanna) (1819–1884) became the wife of the missionary Franz Heinrich Kleinschmidt .

annotation

  1. ↑ Note: This article contains characters from the alphabet of the Khoisan languages spoken in southern Africa . The display contains characters of the click letters ǀ , ǁ , ǂ and ǃ . For more information on the pronunciation of long or nasal vowels or certain clicks , see e.g. B. under Khoekhoegowab .

Sources and literature

  • Barbara Fixy: Still revered in Namibia today . Ed .: Nordsee-Zeitung. Bremerhaven September 19, 2017, p. 25 .
  • Walter Moritz: On the riding ox across southwest Africa - Missionary Schmelen, a pioneer of the Nama language (1811–1848) on the Orange River, in Bethanien, Steinkopf and Komaggas . John Meinert Printing, Windhoek 2004, ISBN 99916-63-30-4 . (With extensive references and quotations from mission reports.)
  • Ursula Trüper: The Hottentottin. The short life of Zara Schmelen (approx. 1793–1831). Missionary and language pioneer in South Africa . Rüdiger Köppe, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-89645-316-5
  • Ursula Trüper: The Invisible Woman: Zara Schmelen, African Mission Assistant at the Cape and in Namaland , Volume 4, Lives, legacies, legends , ISSN 1660-9638, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Basel 2006, ISBN 978-3-90514-191- 7 .

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Schmelen  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Andrea Grotheer: Africa missionary from Kassebruch. In: Weser Kurier website. January 18, 2017, accessed February 12, 2018 .
  2. ↑ The missionary from Kassebruch. In: Radio Bremen website. October 4, 2017, accessed February 12, 2018 .
  3. ^ A b André du Pisani : SWA / Namibia: The Politics of Continuity and Change . Johannesburg, 1986, p. 15
  4. ↑ http://www.horstkleinschmidt.co.za/zara-and-hinrich-schmelen-200th-anniversary.html
  5. ↑ Ursula Trüper: The Hottentottin. The short life of Zara Schmelen (approx. 1793–1831). Missionary and language pioneer in South Africa . Rüdiger Köppe, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-89645-316-5
  6. ↑ Ype Schaaf: L'histoire et le rôle de la Bible en Afrique , CETA, HAHO et CLE, Aubonne 2000, ISBN 9-966-886-72-9 , p 85
personal data
SURNAME Schmelen, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmelen, Johannes Heinrich; Schmelen, Johannes Hinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German missionary; Founder of the Bethanien Mission in South West Africa
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1777
PLACE OF BIRTH Cash break near Bremen
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1848
Place of death Kommagas , South Africa