by Mike Oettle
Note about the
heading[1]
THE history
books call Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp a friend of vagrant Hottentots[2] and recall that he married a teenaged slave girl. Even a close relative dismissed him as a religious fanatic. Is this a man I should be including among the company of the saints?
What led me
to question what I had been taught about Van der Kemp in school was the
presence of his memorial stone in the porch of the Congregational[3] church in
Rondebosch which my family attended when I was a boy. It recorded that this
learned man, a product of the universities of Leyden and Edinburgh, had given
12 years of his life to mission work among the “Caffres[4] and Hottentots”. In particular I was struck by the words: “Dr Vanderkemp[5] was once an infidel but by the Grace of God became a Christian.”
Johannes van der Kemp (born in Rotterdam, 1747) was raised in a family which stressed learning and the Church – his father was a theology professor and his brother a minister – but left Leyden without completing his degree (in medicine, philosophy and theology) to become an officer in the Dragoon Guards. Although a church member, he had no faith in God and lived the life of a libertine. He had a daughter by a married woman.
But even in the army he continued studying theology and wrote a paper which for the first time brought together natural science and natural theology – a major philosophical advance.
In 1780 he fell in love and was married, but his brother officers regarded his wife as inferior and he was forced to resign his commission. He took his wife to Edinburgh, where he attained a doctorate in medicine in 1782. He had arrived. He had a successful medical practice in Holland[6] and a considerable reputation as a philosopher.
But in 1791 a freak storm struck Dordrecht as he, his wife and their two daughters were boating on the River Maas. His family was drowned while Dr Van der Kemp was miraculously saved, by a boat which had been driven out of harbour and into the river by the storm.
Convinced that the Lord had singled him out for special work, he began seeking a calling. He served as a medical officer during the revolutionary campaigns in Flanders (the French Revolution had broken out in 1789) and then as hospital superindendent at Zwijndrecht, near Dordrecht, where in 1797 he came to hear of the formation of the London Missionary Society.
He immediately made contact with the LMS and, at their instigation, helped found the Nederlandsche Zendinggenootschap. He was ordained in London in November 1798 and began recruiting men for the LMS.
Accompanied
by three assistants, J J Kicherer, William Edwards and John Edmonds, he sailed
from London for the Cape in December 1798. Arriving in Cape Town in March ’99,
he was involved the next month in founding Het Zuid Afrikaansche Genootschap
ter Bevordering van de Uitbreiding van Christus Koninkrijk.
In May he
and Edmonds trekked across the Great Fish River to work among the people of the
Xhosa chief Ngqika in the Tyume Valley. He was the first to record the Xhosa
language, but although he was successful in ministering to the Trekboere and
Afrikaans-speaking Khoikhoi (Hottentots) of the region, he made only one Xhosa
convert in his sojourn of almost a year.[7]
Disappointed, he returned to the colony, accepting an invitation to serve
the Dutch Reformed congregation at Graaff-Reinet.
Here he saw a great need to minister to the Khoikhoi, who were flocking to the town in great numbers because of the unsettled state of the district. (The Graaff-Reinet district at the time stretched as far as Algoa Bay and the Fish River, and north-eastwards to the Nuweveld mountains; the nearest town to Graaff-Reinet was Swellendam.) He saw the Khoikhoi as exploited people, deprived of land, of status and of the right to give or withhold their labour, and maintained that they should be placed on an equal footing with the colonists in every respect.
However, the white Graaff-Reinetters – who had twice in the past six years risen in rebellion, first against the Dutch East India Company and then against the British occupation forces – were incensed that “Hotnots” were using their new church building. They were even angrier after Van der Kemp and Resident Commissioner H C D Maynier set up a missionary settlement at Graaff-Reinet in September 1801.
In November a mob of farmers attacked the settlement, burning some of the houses, and Van der Kemp, leaving under cover of darkness, fled with his followers and their stock to Algoa Bay.
The story continues here.
