Valley of grace, fountain of Afrikaans

IT'S a spiritual experience to sit on a bench in the quiet werf or courtyard around the old church in Genadendal; just to sit among the historical buildings and almost feel the presence of the souls who had created this place over the centuries.

The last time I felt like this was when I sat at the entrance of the Blombos Cave near Stilbaai, where members of our species created art and practiced culture for the first time, more than 100,000 years ago.

Genadendal tells the stories of the oldest descendants of Blombos's people, but also of slaves and of my own immediate ancestors, the white trekboers. Bitter stories, but also stories of the resilience, creativity, and perseverance of the human spirit.

A place of great significance

I visited Genadendal near Caledon and just outside Greyton last Friday. My interest was twofold: It was one of the three fountains of my mother tongue, and it is where some of the earliest printing of newspapers, magazines and books was done.

It is indeed the place where the first Afrikaans newspaper was printed and published. And I have ink in my veins.

I know a few native Genadendallers: documentary filmmaker Johan Abrahams, radio and TV personality Terrance April, and Aunt Ilse Naudé, born Weder, whose father was a missionary. She was married to Dr Beyers Naudé and passed away in 2011.

Let me briefly tell the story of Genadendal, surely the most undervalued historical site in our country.

The story begins in 1737. The Khoekhoe pastoralists who, along with the San/Bushmen, had lived in the area for millennia, were under tremendous pressure from the new European arrivals. The smallpox epidemic of 1713 had taken a heavy toll, for unlike Europeans, they had no natural immunity against it.

In 1737, the Moravian missionary Georg Schmidt arrived from Germany in the valley where groups of impoverished Khoekhoe lived in matjieshuise, houses built with grass.

The following year, he and a few followers moved to Baviaanskloof, as Genadendal was initially called, and began planting vegetable gardens, sowing wheat, establishing a threshing floor and building animal pens.

Baptising the first ‘converts’

Schmidt taught the people to read and write and soon began baptising the first “converts", including the chief, Africo. They received “Christian names": Africo became Christian, Vehettge became Magdalena, and Kybbodo became Jonas, for example.

The white clergy of Cape Town and Stellenbosch were strongly opposed to the Christianisation of the Khoekhoen and objected that Schmidt was not an ordained minister and had no authority to baptise. In 1744, Schmidt returned to Germany.

It took 48 years before the Moravian Church again sent missionaries to Genadendal, in 1792. They found Vehettge/Magdalena, known as Ma Lena, with the 17th-century Dutch Bible she had received from Schmidt, which she continued to read and use to teach children to read. This Bible is preserved in the museum.

The new missionaries built houses for themselves and revived the vegetable gardens and fields. Due to objections from the trekboers, the VOC (Dutch East India Company) refused to grant a permit for building a church, but after 1795, the new British authority allowed it.

The community quickly began to grow as other wanderers from the Hessequa and Koopmans clans sought refuge there and some farm labourers escaped from their masters. According to Dr Isaac Balie, former school principal, museum curator,and foremost historian of Genadendal, the white trekboers in the area were opposed to the “Hottentots" becoming literate and as baptised Christians attaining the same status as themselves.

After the abolition of slavery at the Cape in 1834, a number of freed slaves also settled in Genadendal. According to Balie, most inhabitants of Genadendal in the 19th century were of mixed Khoekhoe, slave and white ancestry.

In the early 1800s, Genadendal grew to become the largest settlement in the Cape beyond Cape Town itself. A water mill was erected and still exists and operates today. There was a tannery and three irrigation dams. Inhabitants were trained as masons, carpenters, coppersmiths, and knife-makers.

Genadendallers like to point to the old buildings and tell you that the first teacher's college, kindergarten, and the first guesthouse outside Cape Town for important visitors were built there and still stand. One of the first pharmacies and lending libraries in the country was in Genadendal. The oldest pipe organ is housed in the museum. The original church fell into disrepair, and in 1893 the current church was consecrated.

Besides religion, education was the most important activity. In 1814, there were 250 pupils in the new school building. In 1831, there were 144 children between three and six years old in the kindergarten.

In 1838, the Genadendal Teacher's College was established, the first formal teacher training institution in South Africa. Nearly 250 teachers would eventually be trained here. The college building is now the cultural history museum.

But where does a town of learning find material to read and teach? In 1837, an old Gutenberg press was imported from Holland, one of the very first in Africa. The “Printing Press of the Seminary at Genadendal", complete with a bookbindery, was born.

Soon after, the first book for young children was printed: Simple Lessons for Use in Kindergarten Schools.

In 1859, a monthly newspaper, the very first newspaper in Afrikaans (or “Genadendal Dutch" or “Khoi-Afrikaans"), De Bode, was published, 17 years before Die Afrikaanse Patriot of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (GRA, Society of Real Afrikaners) in 1876.

In 1861, the first youth magazine was published, and teacher guides, The Reformed Church Messenger, and numerous tracts rolled off the presses. The book Benigna of Groenekloof or Mamre was published in 1875.

Later, three more printing presses were imported: The Albion from England, the Bremner from Germany and the Liberty from America. All of these are now preserved in a printer's museum.

The local educationist who oversees the museum and research, Samuel Baatjes, printed an old tract against alcohol abuse on handmade paper on the old Albion press for me just to show that it still works.

This brings me to the “origin" of Afrikaans.

The Khoekhoe whom Georg Schmidt encountered in the region in 1737 already spoke a simplified Khoekhoen dialect of Dutch that had actually begun to form before Jan van Riebeeck's arrival in 1652.

In the 1800s, a more refined version of this was the spoken language of Genadendal, also in the schools and teacher's college.

The community and the teachers resisted the written word being set down differently from their spoken language. Just as the GRA later insisted on “writing as we speak", they wanted to read in their “plat taal" (plain language) rather than High Dutch. There were lively debates in De Bode about this.

The late language and cultural activist Danny Titus declared at a museum day celebration in Genadendal in 2018 that this community played a significant role “in establishing the spoken language as a written language, partly because it was the first institution for tertiary education and partly because it had one of the first printing presses in the Cape where this language could be promoted and published in print and book form".

And so three streams carried the language we know today as Afrikaans: the dialect that arose among the slaves in the Bo-Kaap and was mostly printed in Arabic script; the Khoekhoe/Genadendal Afrikaans; and the GRA's Veeboerafrikaans (cattle farmer Afrikaans) from the Boland.

Hence my recent call to the organisers of Afrikaans 100 that next year's celebrations of a century of Afrikaans as official language not only be held in the GRA's backyard at the Paarl Language Monument, but also in Genadendal and the Bo-Kaap – a suggestion that they seem to have taken on board.

As one might expect in an intellectual environment like old Genadendal, there was strong opposition to apartheid and land ownership restrictions. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Solder Movement (they met in the parsonage's attic) actively opposed apartheid, and Rev Daniel Wessels was placed under house arrest.

Nelson Mandela visited Genadendal in 1995 and was so deeply moved by the experience that he changed his official residence's name from Westbrooke to Genadendal.

The historic part of Genadendal around the old church is very well preserved, but the town itself suffers from severe unemployment and poverty.

♦ VWB ♦

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