![]() Some prayed in the West Indian dialect and some in the languages of central Europe. When the coast was clear, the sugar cane rustled and a few of the brothers returned.Īt the scene of violence they knelt to pray for their white Protestant persecutors. Within minutes the multitude had vanished into the surrounding darkness, the intruders had galloped off on horseback, and only the severely injured lay groaning among patches of blood on the hard-packed earth. Elisabeth Weber, a European sister, was stabbed through the breast, and a cutlass sank deep into Veronika’s shoulder. She clutched her child tighter while another man cracked a bull whip around her. One white man hit a woman over the head as she tried to shelter her baby. They caught the one who had been speaking – a brother baptized “Abraham” – and began to beat him wildly. Swinging cutlasses, heavy-booted men smelling of cane liquor charged into the circle of light beneath the lantern. “Kill them! Shoot them! Beat them! Stab them!” Veronika distinguished the white men’s crude voices at once from the musical West Indian patois, and they struck terror to her soul.īenches rolled over as desperate mothers around her snatched their children to flee. Roars and shouts drowned out the screams of terrified children. Rough men with swords and whips charged in on the multitude. In the crowd gathered there to worship she saw few white faces – until a sudden commotion turned all heads. Now Veronika sat among believers on the Posaunenberg, where on a twenty-seven-acre lot the brothers had built houses among flowering jasmine and lemon trees. They traveled overland to Rotterdam, and from there they set sail for the island of St. Immediately after her marriage to Valentin Löhans in 1738, the community at Herrnhut had agreed to send them out as missionaries to the New World. There she had joined the congregation of believers at Herrnhut in Upper Lusatia, on the lands of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who had become one of their own and a leader among them. On her release, she had fled through the mountains of Silesia to Germany. A peasant girl from the backwoods of Moravia, she had spent a year in prison for having attended secret meetings of believers. Veronika was young – only married a few months – but the road behind her was already long. The Savior was present here, and with the seekers around her, she found joy in coming together to worship him. In spite of the humidity and bugs, in spite of the ever-tightening crowd, Veronika felt deeply thankful for having come to St. More and more – perhaps over five hundred faces – surrounded the light and kept drawing closer to hear what was said. But glancing around her, she saw that no night-flying bugs would disrupt the eager attention of this crowd.įaces kept emerging from the darkness under low-hanging coconut palms. She wondered how the men, mostly without shirts, could ignore them so well. Like the other women at the meeting, Veronika slapped them from her legs and waved them from her ears. ![]() She loved him, a brother in the church community, and to see how he spoke to the people made her glad. Even though she did not understand everything he said, she did not fear him as she would have as a child. ![]() He was tall and strong and moved his arms quickly. The man spoke eagerly, in short syllables. Far back, under a palm thatch roof without walls, she watched the light of a lantern on his face. Veronika Löhans struggled to understand an Afro-Caribbean man speaking to the crowd. In their indirect role as teachers and purveyors of the gospel, Moravian missionaries nurtured a sense of dignity and equality among slaves, which contributed greatly to the emancipation movement in the Danish West Indies.Persecuted 1738, on St. In 1839 all schools for free and slave negroes were placed under Moravian control. Plantation owners initially resisted this instruction, but as the abolition movement swelled over the next hundred years, Moravians inadvertently became facilitators of peace and education. One of the first missionaries, Friedrich Martin, became a strong advocate of teaching literacy among slaves in order to spread the gospel. Although Moravians understood slavery as a condition ordained by God, they believed in the spiritual equality of all souls. She describes the colonization of the islands, including the context of its religious foundations and role of Moravian missionaries from their arrival in 1732 through the ultimate emancipation of the slave population in 1848. The author traces the effects of Moravian mission work on the slave culture of the Danish West Indies.
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