Moravian Missionaries Refound the Genadendal Mission at the Cape

Ten years after Pennsylvania militia massacred ninety six Christian Lenape at the Moravian mission of Gnadenhutten in 1782, and roughly a century before Moravian missionaries founded the Bethel mission in Alaska in 1885, both already recorded here, the Moravian Church's oldest African mission returned from fifty years of silence. Georg Schmidt, the church's first missionary, had founded a station at Baviaanskloof in the Cape's mountains in the late 1730s, baptizing a handful of Khoikhoi converts before Boer farmers and the colony's Dutch Reformed clergy forced him to leave, and the settlement was then abandoned. In November 1792, three Moravian missionaries, Hendrick Marsveld, Daniel Schwinn and Christian Kuhnel, arrived at the ruined station and found one of Schmidt's own converts, an elderly woman remembered as Magdalena, still reading from the New Testament he had given her decades earlier and still teaching others to pray from it. The three refounded the mission on the spot, renaming it Genadendal, valley of grace, and from it Moravian work spread across the Cape colony, eight hundred people living at the settlement within six years. Genadendal stands today as the oldest Moravian mission village in Africa and a declared South African national heritage site, its 1792 refounding proof that the seed Schmidt had planted more than fifty years before had never actually died.