Mamre Moravian Mission Station

Mamre lies about fifty kilometres north of central Cape Town, reached off the R27 by way of the R307 between Atlantis and Darling. It is a working town of several thousand people, and on its western side stands the reason to come: a Moravian mission werf where the church, the parsonage, former military barracks, a cook house, a school, an old shop and a water mill still stand in relation to one another, along a wide road under old trees. The complex around the church was declared a National Monument in 1967 and the water mill separately in 1973. What makes the place unusual is not any single building but the fact that the settlement pattern survives intact, and that the community living around it descends from the people who were brought together here.

The ground was occupied long before any of this. The area was known as Groene Kloof, and the Cochoqua, a Khoekhoe group, grazed cattle on it. In 1700 the meat contractor Henning Hüsing was granted grazing rights by the Dutch East India Company, and in 1701 the Governor, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, established a military post there, its stated purpose being to protect the farmers from the Khoekhoe. The land at issue was ground the Cochoqua had grazed long before the Company reached it. The post and its buildings were called De Kleine Post. It later served as a Company cattle post until 1791. Some of those buildings are still standing, which is why parts of the mission station are older than the mission itself.

The mission was established in 1808, shortly after the Cape passed to British control. The Moravian missionaries JF Kohrhammer and JH Schmitt, then based at Genadendal, were given permission by the Governor, the Earl of Caledon, to found a station here, and the government farm De Kleine Post together with the adjoining Louwskloof and Cruijwagenskraal was handed over for the purpose. This made Mamre the second Moravian mission station in the Cape after Genadendal. The site was chosen for practical reasons: it already had usable buildings left by the Company, and there was already a Khoekhoe settlement to work among. The stated aim was conversion. The Moravians renamed the place Mamre in 1854, after the biblical Mamre of Genesis.

The people who made the settlement are better documented here than at most sites of this kind. Hans Klapmuts, chief of the Cochoqua, lived on Louwskloof and resisted conversion for some thirty years, though many of his followers did not. The first service was held outdoors in 1808 for about a hundred people. His sister Rosetta Klapmuts, baptised as Benigna Johannes in 1813, became chief of the Cochoqua after his death and is remembered locally as the mother of Mamre; she owned a wagon and cattle and lent them to haul building material for the church, and her descendants still live in the town. After the four-year “apprenticeship” that followed abolition ended on 1 December 1838, the community changed again: Moravian records show that most of the roughly seven hundred people who applied to settle here between 1839 and 1852 were formerly enslaved, coming mainly from farms in the Koeberg, Blaauberg and Malmesbury districts and some from as far as Swellendam and Clanwilliam. On 2 December 1838 the mission held a thanksgiving service marking the end of slavery.

The church was begun in 1808 and completed in 1818, which makes it one of the oldest church buildings in the country. Its bell, weighing around 250 kilograms and carrying inscribed biblical text, was installed in 1872, and the Marcussen organ was ordered from Denmark in 1885 and inaugurated in November 1887; it survives in its original form. The parsonage is the oldest building on the werf and carries a seventeenth-century date on its gable, a legacy of the Company outpost rather than the mission. The Long House served as military barracks and later, with the parsonage, housed the first school classes; a purpose-built school was added in 1876. The cook house dates from around 1700 and has been put to several uses since, including a spell as a police station and lock-up. Milling tells its own story of gradual change: a horse mill built in 1830 was replaced by a water mill within roughly a decade, a steam engine was added in 1873 and later a diesel engine, and the mill finally stopped working in December 1954.

Two episodes from the twentieth century belong on the page because they happened here. In December 1962 an Umkhonto we Sizwe training camp was organised at Mamre with the involvement of Looksmart Ngudle and Denis Goldberg, and it is recognised as the first MK training camp inside South Africa; it was abandoned quickly once the Security Police took an interest. And in the early 1970s the Johannes family — Benigna’s descendants — were forcibly removed from the Louwskloof farm they had lived on since the mission was founded, under apartheid legislation. Neither story is decoration. They are part of why the continuity of this community is worth noticing rather than assuming.

For a visitor, the experience is a walk rather than a building tour. The werf is laid out along a wide road with whitewashed, mostly thatched buildings on either side, oaks and other mature trees, a watercourse and a path beside it, and open ground that carries veld flowers in spring. West Coast Way maintains a self-guided Mamre Heritage Walk map that leads past eight of the historic buildings and then up the hill behind the settlement to the cemetery, where many headstones carry German names and dates from the eighteen hundreds, and past the ruins of a house with a long view over the valley. Local guides, several of them from families that go back generations here, can be asked for and will tell you a great deal that no map carries.

Two practical things are worth saying plainly. The main group of buildings is still owned, administered and used by the Moravian Church, and the church is a working congregation rather than a monument, so walking the precinct is not the same as being free to enter individual buildings. We could not establish current published opening hours, entry or tour fees, or booking arrangements for the buildings, so plan on the outdoor walk and arrange anything more in advance. And Mamre is somebody’s home town, not an open-air exhibit: the ordinary courtesies of walking through a small community apply.