Carl Hugo Hahn

Carl Hugo Hahn (1818–1895) was a Baltic German missionary and linguist who worked in South Africa and South-West Africa for most of his life. Together with Franz Heinrich Kleinschmidt, he set up the first Rhenish mission station for the Herero people in Gross Barmen. Hahn is known for his scientific work on the Herero language.

Hahn was born into a bourgeois family on 18 October 1818 in Ādaži (Aahof) near Riga in the Russian Empire. He studied Engineering at the Engineering School of the Russian Army from 1834 onwards but was not satisfied with that choice and, more generally, his parents' way of life. In 1837 he left Ādaži for Barmen (today part of Wuppertal, Germany) to apply at the missionary school of the Rhenish Missionary Society. He was admitted to the Missionary School in Elberfeld (also part of Wuppertal today) in 1838 and graduated in 1841.

Hahn arrived in Cape Town on 13 October 1841. His orders were to bring Christianity to the Nama and the Herero in South West Africa—not an easy task considering that both tribes were enemies at that time, albeit at peace from Christmas Day 1842 to 1846. He travelled to Windhoek (or as the locals called it then, ǀAiǁgams) in 1842 and was well received by Jonker Afrikaner, Captain of the Orlam Afrikaner tribe residing there. When in 1844 Wesleyan missionaries led by Richard Haddy arrived at the invitation of Jonker Afrikaner, Hahn and his colleague Franz Heinrich Kleinschmidt moved northwards into Damaraland to avoid conflict with them.

Hahn and Kleinschmidt arrived at Otjikango on 31 October 1844. They named the place Barmen (today Gross Barmen) after the headquarters of the Rhenish Missionary Society in Germany and established the first Rhenish mission station to the Herero there. Hahn learned the language and taught gardening and animal husbandry, building a church in 1850 and attempting to evangelize. At that time Jonker Afrikaner oversaw the development of the road network in South-West Africa. Hahn and Kleinschmidt initiated the creation of a path from Windhoek to Barmen via Okahandja, and in 1850 this road, later known as Alter Baiweg (Old Bay Path), was extended via Otjimbingwe to Walvis Bay. This route served as an important trade connection between the coast and Windhoek until the end of the century.

Their missionary work was not very successful, and in 1850, after a crushing Herero defeat at the hands of Jonker's Nama troops in Okahandja, the Herero fled the area. Hahn was recalled to Germany to report back but was given new orders upon arrival in Cape Town in November 1852. Since Haddy had fled Windhoek in the wake of Jonker's raids, Hahn was tasked to fill the void, but he failed and returned to Germany, arriving in Barmen on 13 September 1853.

He traveled Europe between 1853 and 1856 to gather support for his endeavors, which by then were considered futile by the Rhenish Missionary Society. He returned with the order to evangelize the people in Ovamboland, after a brief return to Otjimbingwe where some of the Herero had fled, but his four-month 1857 expedition with the Rev. Johannes Rath to the Ovambo at Ondangwa ended in a disaster, and the members barely escaped alive. Moreover, Gross Barmen was almost destroyed by then due to the skirmishes between Namas and Hereros.

Hahn's next expedition took him, Rath, and Frederick Thomas Green to the banks of the Cunene River. His writing about the journey would later be published in the German travelogue Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, in which his descriptions of northern Hereroland and the San language, territory, and culture corroborated Francis Galtons reports on Ovamboland. Hahn also included a description of the Etosha pan and collected animal specimens for the Natural History Museum, Berlin. A shortage of missionaries stymied the Rhenish Missionaries in Ovamboland, and Hahn himself returned to Germany in June 1859 to escape the Nama-Herero war, finding friends and support for the Rhenish Missionaries on a whirlwind tour of Germany, England, and Russia.

After the Herero defeated the Nama on many occasions, missionary work was continued. Having turned down an offer to lead the Berlin Missionary Society in 1863, Hahn returned to Otjimbingwe in January 1864 and established a missionary station and a theological seminary there (which he named the Augustineum after St. Augustine of Hippo) to educate indigenous missionaries, this time recruiting German artisans and farmers to supply the settlement. In 1868, however, an attack by the Nama ended his hitherto successful project, and the Herero under Chief Maharero fled the settlement to Okahandja and gave up their Christian affiliations. In 1870 Hahn brokered a ten-year peace deal between the Nama and the Herero and convinced the Finnish Missionary Society to take over missionary work in Ovamboland. When the Rhenish Missionary Society began trading for profit and colonizing (rejecting his Lutheran austerity for a more Reformed Church orientation), Hahn severed his ties with them on 4 March 1872 and returned in 1873 to Germany, by which time 13 missions in Hereroland were prospering. He relocated to the Cape Colony.