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The Genadendal Diaries

Properties3
descriptionThe diaries the Moravian missionaries kept at Baviaanskloof (Genadendal) from 1792, and the digital transcriptions of the Utrecht Archives copies published in 2025. What the files hold, their limits, and how this wiki uses them.
tagstheme/heritage, lang/en
aliasesGenadendal Diaries, Diarium von Baviaanskloof, Dagverhaal van Baviaanskloof

6 min read

When the Missionaries of 1792 reopened the mission at Baviaanskloof, they kept a diary of daily life at the mission and sent copies to their church leaders in Europe [IC]. These diaries are one of the fullest written records of the valley between 1792 and the early 1800s. Copies are held at Het Utrechts Archief (the Utrecht Archives) in the Netherlands [MS]. In December 2025 researchers at TU Dresden published digital transcriptions of four of the Utrecht copies, with translations, on the Zenodo research archive [MS]. This page describes those files, their limits, and how this wiki uses them. The earlier diary kept by Georg Schmidt, from 1737 to 1744, is a separate record, described on Georg Schmidt’s Diary.

What the letters in square brackets mean

Facts on this page are followed by a tag that shows where they come from.

  • [IC] Independently Corroborated. Confirmed by at least two sources that do not depend on each other, or by an official record.
  • [MS] Mission-Sourced. Comes from the diary files themselves, or from their makers’ own descriptions. It has not been checked against other sources.
  • [TBV] To Be Verified. Seems likely, but nobody has confirmed it yet.

Whose voice these are

The diaries were written by the missionaries. They record Khoekhoe residents’ words and lives as the missionaries heard and judged them, and they call them “Hottentots”, a colonial name now considered offensive. The name appears on this page only in quotations. See Khoekhoe.

At a glance

Written byHendrik Marsveld, Daniel Schwinn, and Johann Christian Kühnel, and later missionaries at Baviaanskloof [IC]
LanguagesGerman, with some copies in Dutch [MS]
Held atHet Utrechts Archief, Utrecht [MS]
Digital editionMultilingual working and reading versions of the “Genadendal Diaries” from the Utrecht Archives, Zenodo, version 0.3, 30 December 2025, under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0) [MS]
Prepared byJuan Luis Garcés Pérez (SLUB Dresden) and Alexander Lasch (Chair of German Linguistics and Language History, TU Dresden), in the digitalherrnhut research network [MS]
Machine-readable versionThe Genadendal Diaries repository on GitHub: the four files as tables and plain text, with new English translations that no person has checked yet [MS]
Printed English editionThe Genadendal Diaries, edited by H.C. Bredekamp, A.B.L. Flegg, and H.E.F. Plüddemann, University of the Western Cape, 1992. Volume 1 covers 1792 to 1794 [IC].

The four Utrecht files

Each file carries the Utrecht Archives reference number of the diary it transcribes [MS].

FileLanguage of the originalPeriod covered
NL-UtHUA_A363595German1792 to 1795, beginning with the diary of the three missionaries [MS]
NL-UtHUA_A363349Dutch1793 to about 1798, in monthly or longer reports; the reports for 10 April to 31 August 1794 are missing [MS]
NL-UtHUA_A363596GermanAbout 1795 to 1796 [TBV]
NL-UtHUA_A363597GermanMay 1803 to February 1804 [MS]

Together the four files hold about 35,000 lines of text [MS].

How the files are laid out

Each file is a table exported from a spreadsheet, with one row for each line of the handwritten page [MS]. Every row has its own number, such as NL-UtHUA_A363597_00022, which makes it possible to cite a single line [MS]. The table has five columns [MS]:

  1. ID. The line’s number.
  2. Diplomatic transcription. The text exactly as written, with the old spelling and line breaks.
  3. Normalised text. The same text in modern German spelling. For the Dutch diary (A363349), this column is a German translation of the Dutch.
  4. English.
  5. Afrikaans.

Markers such as <pb n="2a" /> show where each page of the manuscript begins, and name the photograph of that page [MS].

The limits of the English column

The English and Afrikaans columns appear to be automatic translations, made one line at a time [TBV]. In 57 rows of the files for 1795 to 1796 and 1803 to 1804, the English cell holds only the words “Wird geladen…” (German for “Loading…”), which a spreadsheet shows while an automatic translation is still running [MS]. Because each line is translated on its own, sentences that run over several lines are often broken or wrong. One line in the 1803 diary says that Brother Rose began classes for communion candidates, “and the Hottentots showed themselves very grateful for this instruction” [MS]. The English column gives it as “I am very grateful for this lesson” [MS]. Elsewhere the German word Kennzeichen (a mark or sign) is translated as “license plate” [MS].

The makers call these files “working and reading versions” [MS]. The transcription and the normalised text are the reliable parts. The English is a rough guide to what a passage is about.

How this wiki uses the diaries

  • Facts taken from the diaries are tagged [MS], because they are the missionaries’ own record.
  • Citations give the row number of the line, so readers can find it in the files.
  • Quotations are translated from the normalised text (or, for the Dutch diary, from the Dutch), and the page says who made the translation. The English column of the files is not quoted.
  • For 1792 to 1794, translations are checked against the printed English edition of 1992.
  • The Zenodo record offers the four files only as PDFs [MS]. Machine-readable copies (tables and plain text) are published in the open Genadendal Diaries repository, under the same CC BY 4.0 licence [MS]. The repository adds new English translations, one diary entry at a time. These are machine translations that no person has checked yet, so this wiki does not quote them as finished translations. See Research Contributors.

What is still open

  • Zenodo shows that a newer version of the record than version 0.3 exists. What it changes has not been checked.
  • The exact period covered by file A363596.
  • How the Utrecht copies relate to the diaries held at the Genadendal Mission Museum, which a separate Zenodo edition (Part I, 1792 to 1800) transcribes.
  • How many volumes of the printed English edition were published, and which years they cover.
  • Whether the diaries mention Jan Paerl, and which Khoekhoe residents they name.

Have your say

If you can read the old German or Dutch hand, know the diaries, or can help translate them, contact the moderators via How to Submit.

Contributors

  • Digital transcriptions pointed out by Samuel Baatjies, museum educator at the Genadendal Mission Museum, 2026.

References

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