The Sinners' Bench

Just before she dies, the writer’s mother leaves her with a difficult secret and a kist containing the family archives. Detective-style, she sets out to unpack the kist and weave together the story of her parents, descendants of German Lutheran missionaries. As she delves into the relics, documents, photographs, and correspondence between her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, she realizes the difficulty of retrieving the past, if not the impossibility. She records memories of her childhood and of the people who inhabited the mission village of Hermannsburg, founded in the 1850s in KwaZulu-Natal. We join her in games, songs, meals, and explorations around the village and the surrounding landscape. As a passionate love story unfolds, her detective’s eye morphs, and the gaze on her parents softens.

In the end, she sets out on a physical journey to Hermannsburg. We visit the school she attended and join her in her search for the family of Grace Sithole, who had mothered her. We enter the mission house, now turned into a museum. Standing in a room full of religious ephemera, she has the visceral sensation of how everybody’s lives had been controlled by the concept of sin and sinning. Finally, she finds some resolution in the foothills of the Drakensberg and in the fullness of completing her parents’ story.

The Sinners’ Bench uses different modes and tones to tell a story. The personal story is conveyed as a memoir, which in turn is embedded in family history. This history is explored as part of the history and culture of the German Lutheran missionaries in South Africa.