Johann Keetman

Johann Keetman (born November 29, 1793 in Hamburg , sometimes wrongly given as 1796 ; † October 10, 1865 in Elberfeld ) was a German merchant and banker , after whom the Namibian town of Keetmanshoop was named.

Life

Johann Keetman was the eldest son of Johann Keetman Senior , who was a partner in a trading and shipping company in Hamburg until he closed down.

Johann Keetman had a younger brother named Wilhelm (* 1803), who later was pastor in the Wiedisches Land (Rhenish) Westerwald , first in Dierdorf , then, from 1848 to 1876, in Rengsdorf . The family tree can be traced back to the Dutch city ​​of Edam as far back as the 16th century , where the Keetmans lived as salt boilers in middle-class circumstances.

Keetman grew up in Neuwied in the Rhineland . He came to Elberfeld with his family around 1820 and became a businessman there.

In Elberfeld, he married Wilhelmine Wichelhaus and then joined the bank of his father-in-law J. Wichelhaus as a banker ( J. Wichelhaus P. Sohn ). In Elberfeld Keetman also became a city ​​councilor , member of the commercial court , president of the board of trustees of the municipal orphanage and presbyter of the Reformed community.

Rhenish Mission Society

From 1828 Keetman was director of the Rhenish Mission Society . In 1843 Keetman took over its chairmanship and was particularly involved in missionary work in what is now Namibia, which only became a German colony much later as German South West Africa .

From 1857 on, the Rhenish Mission Society came up with the idea that the “starving souls” in south-west Africa urgently needed a mission station . However, because the German area was going through an economic crisis at that time , there was no money available to send a missionary there. That is why Johann Keetman donated 1000 thalers initially in order to be able to implement such a project.

With the help of Keetman's donation, the missionary son Johann Schröder was later sent to the village of Swartmodder (also Zwartmorast ), in the south of the country, to set up a mission station and thus laid the foundation for what would later become Keetmanshoop. Swartmodder was renamed Keetmanshoop after Keetman's death in 1865.

According to other sources, Schröder did not reach the area around Swartmodder until 1866 and thus only after the death of Johann Keetman, whereupon he immediately renamed the village Keetmanshoop. In 1868, a church was built with the funds provided by Johann Keetman, but it was destroyed in the course of a flood in 1890 and was then rebuilt from 1895.

Others

In addition to Keetmanshoop, there are other places or cities in southern Africa , which are still reminiscent of the early missionary work of the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft from Wuppertal and are mainly connected with Johann Keetman.

In South Africa there are z. B. about 200 km north of Cape Town the village of Wupperthal . And even the capital of Namibia, Windhoek , was called Elberfeld in the first few years after it was founded.

Johann Keetman never visited Keetmanshoop himself.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} biography information on Johann Keetman (PDF file; 1007 kB) on uni-koeln.de, January 28, 2012.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Klaus Dierks: Biographies of Namibian personalities in alphabetical order: K , February 11, 2012. (English)
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} The African Elberfeld or who was Johann Keetman?  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 694 kB)   In: The quarter hour - the district's magazine (September 2005), January 28, 2012.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Johann Keetman is unforgotten  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   . In: Our Bergische Heimat - local history monthly supplement to the General-Anzeiger of the city of Wuppertal (December 1966) on Archiv.bgv-rhein-berg.de , January 28, 2012.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Keetmanshoop - Memory Lane  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   , November 9, 2012 (English).