Page 43 - The Diary of A. H. W. Behrens

16
1863
II. About my school time, 1863 – 1873
So, at the beginning of 1863 my sister and I came to Hermannsburg for school, the only school for all children of Hermannsburg missionaries and colonialists. I was almost nine years old and Marie was seven.
Hermannsburg in Natal is the oldest of the stations and the first station of the Hermannsburg Mission in Africa. Upon the first secondment a farm was purchased in the Umvoti County, near the village of Greytown, from a Mr Behrens in Durban. All stations in Natal, Zululand and Transvaal were established from Hermannsburg.
The first school was run by Miss Hardeland, but soon it was placed under the responsibility of Missionary Heinrich Müller who was a born teacher. He just had the gift of teaching, although he was a qualified fitter. The school flourished under him and established a reputation in the whole of South Africa. Initially there were only German children there and everything was done in German. But when the British colonialists heard of the school, they asked whether their children could also be admitted because in those times there were very few schools
in South Africa. Slowly but surely more and more English boys (no girls) came and we had boys from Cape Town
(the Harveys), from Durban (Acutts and Addisons), from Maritzburg (Scott, Pepworth, Erekine, Otto), from Pretoria, from Bloemfontein etc. so that the English boys were greater in number than the German boys and we needed English teachers. From the nearby village of Greytown the children of the Handleys and Armstrongs etc. joined us. There were 80 – 100 boys at the school.
Our teachers were Müller, Rössler, Reideling, Leisenberg, all missionaries. Then there were also Schmitt, our music teacher, the old Scotsman Muirhead and his son John Muirhead, and the