Adele Steinwender's Diary: Gendered Observations on a Berlin Mission Station in Bethanie

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I explore ways in which the private diary of a single German woman in a southern African colonial environment can shed light on both the missionary domesticity she had entered into, as well as the ways her own feminine identity was defined and changed by this encounter. Adele Steinwender's diary provides one with an inside perspective of a German woman who settled in a Boer Republic in 1885 as the teacher of the missionaries’ children. Her writings reflect an emotional observation of daily occurrences on a Berlin Mission Station in the Orange Free State. She lived with the Grützner family, and the majority of her entries during the period of 1885 to 1889, pertain to the relations she developed with her host parents and their children. This diary offers one voyeuristic insight into the mission society as perceived by someone who often felt ostracised by the small missionary community. Her feelings of exclusion were exacerbated by her being unable to connect with the inhabitants of the station. Yet the reduction of the missionised's (and other African) presences in Steinwender's diary to intriguing descriptions of white women's management of relationships with black household servants, is revealing in itself of the gendered and racialised hierarchies among station inhabitants. Considering the strong focus on domestic matters in so many of her inscriptions, this diary reveals an aspect of missionary society that was often neglected in the writings of the male missionaries.