Abstract:
This research sets out to answer a problem involving whether or not the first
church was established across the Vaal River in the 1860s at Gerlachshoop
(Maleoskop). An incidental find of an unknown publication may corroborate
an answer to the problem. Anecdotal notes in a hymnal songbook record the
first inauguration of a bell of one of the earliest Berlin Missionaries north of the
Vaal River. This may clarify the location within the landscape and whether the
structure of a church at Gerlachshoop or Thabantšho was erected, as opposed
to being a deception or a historical figment of imagination by a subsequent
director of the Berlin Missionary Society. The national heritage value of such rare
early documentation of European/African literature and the built environment
is of great significance and serves as one of the earliest records of German
translations into the Sekopa language almost 150 years ago, with several early
hymns set to musical notation, that marked the occasion when the actual Sekopa
hymns were sung at the event of the inauguration of an early church and its bell.
