The Sinners' Bench

Abstract

The Sinners’ Bench’ is a memoir which follows the writer’s trawling through family archives, to discover answers to a secret which was revealed to her only a few weeks before her mother’s death. Namely, that her mother had had a love affair, and that her fourth child had been the fruit of this relationship. What particularly shocked the writer was that, as punishment, her mother, together with her four small children, had been made to sit on the church’s Sinners’ Bench. All this took place in Hermannsburg in Kwa Zulu Natal, where the family was living and where she herself grew up. To investigate this event, the writer explores the history of this tiny German-speaking village which was established by the Hermannsburg Missionary Society in 1884. By delving into letters and other documents, ‘The Sinners’ Bench’ looks at the German Lutheran diaspora in South Africa, its cultural and theological underpinnings, and its relationship to Nazism and to Apartheid. While the writer gains some insights into her parents’ complex interactions with their historical and cultural context, ultimately she fails to uncover the mysteries of their relationship to each other and to her mother’s lover