The Invisible Woman, Zara Schmelen, African Mission Assistant at the Cape and in Namaland, by Ursula Truper.

The missionaries who came to Namibia in the early nineteenth century, many of German origin, agreed that the soul of a nation lay in its language. They therefore took great pains to learn the mother tongue of their mission community, develop it into a written form and then translate the Bible into the language of their converts.

Hinrich Schmelen of the London Missionary Society was no exception. Stationed in Bethany for many years, the missionary became well known for his translation of the New Testament into Nama. He was greatly applauded for this enormous task, as Nama, with its numerous click sounds, was regarded as a particularly difficult language for a European to learn.

Strangely enough, for a long time nobody asked how Schmelen was able to accomplish this task, when he himself admitted that he could only speak and understand very little Nama. The missionary was able to achieve this linguistic feat only with the help of a colleague, a colleague who was not only able to develop Nama into a written language, but who was passionate about bringing the words of the Bible to life in an African cultural context. Zara Schmelen, a Nama woman, was this colleague. She was also Hinrich Schmelen's wife.

For decades, Zara was invisible in the historical records of her own country. Like most women of her time, she dutifully remained in the background, and as a Black woman, married to a White missionary, she came to be viewed as an embarrassment to the church and colonial historians, especially during the prohibition of interracial marriages. It was only due to another woman's curiosity, German historian Ursula Truper, that Zara Schmelen's important contribution to Namibian church history was discovered more than 150 years after her death.

A family secret

Ursula Truper became interested in Namibian history when she discovered a family secret: a female African ancestor. Truper knew that she was the great-great-great granddaughter of Hinrich Schmelen, but the fact that her famous missionary ancestor had married an African woman had been kept secret in her family for generations. Truper was intrigued and wanted to know more.

In the numerous Namibia-related missionary records, the Berlin-based Truper discovered only scant reference to Zara Schmelen, and not one photograph or sketch of her. A sentence here and there in a letter or report and some short diary entries by her husband is all that has survived of a woman who was a pioneer of the study of the Nama language and the evangelisation of her people. However, Ursula Truper managed to turn these scarce details into a fascinating book that brings to life Zara Schmelen's dedication to her work as well as the times in which she lived.

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Six years later, two women lecturers at the Paulinum Theological Seminar in Windhoek, Loretta Carter and Bettina Duwe, discovered this jewel in their library. At last they had found some written proof of the contribution of an indigenous woman to the history of the church and the country! However, the book was written in German and thus accessible to only a few. The idea of its translation was met with enthusiasm and encouragement at a Women's Theological Seminar and working in their spare time, without a fee, the women finished this self-imposed task in 2006. The book, The Invisible Woman--Zara Schmelen--African Mission Assistant at the Cape and in Namaland, was published by Basler Afrika Bibliographien in the same year.

Reviewed by Erika von Wietersheim