This study explores the possibilities of extracting biographies of ‘ordinary Africans’, especially women, from the epistolary networks of a transcontinental Lutheran community of readers. Due to the enthusiastic efforts of a number of German deaconesses, women from British colonial Africa whose narrations might otherwise not have been recorded, participated in conv...

Carl Adolf Hoffmann is counted among the most prolific 19th- and 20th-century authors employed by the Berlin Missionary Society in the former Transvaal, South Africa, home to the Berlin Mission Church's northern-Sotho/Sepedi-speaking synods. Hoffmann attempted to record African history and cultural practices with a view to preserving them for posterity by rendering...