A Brief History of the Berlin Mission Society in South Africa

The Berlin Mission Society (BMS) was one of four German Protestant mission societies active in 19th and 20th century South Africa. Born out of the tradition of Pietism in Germany and at the time of evangelical revival after the Napoleonic wars, the BMS sent its first missionaries to South Africa in 1834; it was formally disbanded in 1972. After an initial period of hardship and disappointments, it experienced an upsurge in its activities after 1859, which lasted up to World War One. In the latter half of the 19th century, the BMS was moderately represented in the Free State, the Eastern Cape and Natal and had a very strong presence in the northern and eastern parts of the Transvaal Boer republic. Events in Europe between 1914 and 1945 affected mission work negatively and made contact between the Board in Berlin and the missionaries in South Africa difficult, at times even impossible. The post‐1945 period was fraught with problems resulting from the division of Germany and its former capital, Berlin; global challenges resulting from the Cold War and decolonisation in Africa; and lastly, the racial policies of the apartheid government. The BMS was part of the broad evangelical mission movement and was thus barely distinct from other societies. Yet, both its Pietist and Lutheran heritage and its relative distance from the colonial powers that be resulted in its characteristic emphasis on spiritual inwardness, its uncompromising stand on puritanical values such as morality, hard work and self‐discipline and its difficulties with urban cosmopolitanism – and ultimately also in its inability to speak and act decisively against injustice and racial discrimination.